Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pacabel | Hacker News Reader

The similarity to Rust should scare the hell out of Rust's creators and proponents.

Swift could very well render Rust almost totally irrelevant within the OS X and iOS sphere of software development. If we end up eventually seeing Swift implemented for other platforms, then the chances of Rust's long-term success diminish even more.

Things might have been different had a stable, even if somewhat imperfect, initial version of Rust had been released by now, thus allowing it to gain some adoption and traction.

I hope that the "But Rust isn't targeting those developers!" argument isn't used to try to justify this mistake, as well. Rust is already facing stiff competition from languages like Go, C++11, C++14, Scala and even Java 8.

With the announcement of Swift, Rust's niche and audience are getting smaller, further preventing the widespread adoption that's necessary for a programming language to become truly successful.

View on HN

Oh hello again, Pacabel. I'm familiar with your game by now. :)

We're not scared in the slightest. I'll reconsider when Swift has inline ASM, allocators, linear types, move semantics by default, region analysis, and a type system that guarantees freedom from data races (oh, and when the code is open-sourced, and targets both Linux and Windows as a first-class citizen).

Swift isn't intended to be a systems language: it's an application language. Anyone who's capable of choosing Swift as of today was just as capable of choosing Objective-C yesterday. And as the Rust developers themselves have discovered over the past two years, deciding to become a systems language doesn't happen overnight.

(In fact, on a personal note, I'm ecstatic that Swift has been announced. ADTs! Optional types! Pattern matching! Think of how many features are no longer alien to people who want to learn Rust! And hell, the syntax is incredibly similar as well, which further reduces friction. As a hardcore Rust contributor, I want to shake the hand of each and every one of Swift's designers.)

I saw a lot of people mention ADT in relation to Swift but I haven't found examples in the documentation book I downloaded from Apple. Would you be kind enough to provide the example you saw? EDIT: My bad, page 40 in the section about protocols (unless I'm missing something).

It's on the bottom half of the page about enumerations. Typically languages have product types, but lack true sum types. Swift's enums provide such leverage.

That said, Swift's types are a bit less than recursive, so there's a bit of niggling still before you get to the affordances of something like Haskell's `data`.

Thank you.

It's interesting that inline assembly is your first bullet point, since there's nothing I can think of that ruins a code file more than inline assembly in a host language. Put that crap in a .S file and link it in like everything else, for crying out loud. The one time you need inline assembly is when you don't want to build a function frame, such as a tight loop, but come on.

Also, even in systems, I can think of about once a decade I even need to write assembly, so... maybe grasping at straws a bit?

I wouldn't lead with inline assembler as the selling point of Rust. The main selling point of Rust is memory safety without garbage collection; it still is the only industry language that allows this (as reference counting is a form of GC).

That said, I think inline assembler is an important feature:

> It's interesting that inline assembly is your first bullet point, since there's nothing I can think of that ruins a code file more than inline assembly in a host language. Put that crap in a .S file and link it in like everything else, for crying out loud.

That's too slow. You need to give the optimizer more information than that, and the overhead of the procedure call can be significant.

> The one time you need inline assembly is when you don't want to build a function frame, such as a tight loop, but come on.

But that's a very important use case.

> Also, even in systems, I can think of about once a decade I even need to write assembly, so... maybe grasping at straws a bit?

It's all over the place in the Linux kernel.

> But that's a very important use case.

For Rust. I didn't make the comparison to Rust, I merely was intrigued by the choice of features and in which order to defend the comparison made by someone else. I see Rust and Swift as targeting entirely different things, at least at first (which means that Swift can certainly evolve inline assembly if it is so needed), and any comparison at this stage is pointless.

> It's all over the place in the Linux kernel.

Cool, that's one piece of software. I'll save you the next few: drivers and a couple files in a game engine. You're disputing my point how, exactly?

> The one time you need inline assembly is when you don't want to build a function frame, such as a tight loop, but come on.

This is hilarious. Like anyone would ever use inline assembly in a tight loop.

I'm confused that you seem to think that my bullet points are ordered from most to least important. It seems like quite a strange thing to attack! I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I do not run these comments by a team of editors first. :)

That said, judging by your other comments, you seem to be of the impression that the Rust team has some sort of vendetta against Go, and have concocted a vendetta in kind. Again, I must sadly disappoint you, but I strive to encourage a culture of respect in all the forums that I visit (and moderate).

If you find my comments disrespectful and think I'm implying you have a vendetta, you skimmed them and are disrespecting me by putting words in my mouth. I've simply noticed a trend of most commentary from Rust contributors taking the underdog position and participating in picking apart other (ostensibly) competing languages, and I think you guys should stop doing that.

The last sentence of the comment to which you hint is my thesis. There is no subtext. It's easy to perceive negative opinions as attacks and create an adversary from the person writing the opinion, but it's also a little bit disingenuous. It also, conveniently, creates a platform upon which nobody can disagree with you lest they be hostile and aggressive. You can then exit on the "high ground," as you've done here.

I meant no ill will. Best of luck, I guess.

My apologies, I didn't realize that expecting a programming language to have a stable syntax, stable semantics, a stable standard library and at least one stable and robust implementation before using it seriously in industry was merely a "game".

Perhaps this is news to you, but those of us who work on and are responsible for large-scale software systems tend to take such factors very seriously.

This may sound harsh, but it really doesn't matter what features and benefits Rust could potentially bring to the table if the lack of stability makes it unusable in practice today. A programming language that can't be seriously used might as well not even exist.

I don't doubt that Apple will have Swift available in a seriously usable form by this fall, and it's very likely that it will see rapid adoption soon after. I'm afraid I can't say the same about Rust and its supposed by-the-end-of-2014 1.0 release, given its current lack of stability and the rapidly-approaching end of the year.

You seem to desire both stability and a faster 1.0 release. The realistic choices are:

    1. Release fast and iterate
    2. Release fast and be stuck with mistakes
    3. Release slow

Option #1 breaks stability, so that's out.

Swift appears to be taking option #2 (Apple doesn't commonly break APIs, do they?), but we can't even really be sure because it hasn't been developed in the open the way that Rust has. It's possible that it's been in development as long as Rust, and we simply haven't heard about it yet. Either way, option #2 is a perfectly reasonable one to go with; it has served Java quite well (for a loose definition of fast), though it has required some creative approaches to language improvements.

Rust is taking option #3. C has been around for over 40 years now. If Rust hopes to supplant it, it seems reasonable to take a few extra months (or even an extra year) to put out a solid version 1 that won't hamstring the language or force a breaking change down the line.

Apple just announced in the Platform State of the Union that they won't guarantee source compatibility until Swift is released along with iOS 8 (changes to the language will require source conversions), so I believe they're taking a route closer to option #1.

No I'd say Apples approach was: methodically develop until very polished first, then announce after. You just didn't get to see the 0.1, 0.2, 0.3... versions.

This is actually nice, because knowing about languages years before they are production ready probably just slows developer adoption because nobody is quite sure when they should trust there development process to a new language.

>My apologies, I didn't realize that expecting a programming language to have a stable syntax, stable semantics, a stable standard library and at least one stable and robust implementation before using it seriously in industry was merely a "game"

You also didn't realize that you just built the biggest strawman ever in the above sentence.

Enough with the "I want a stable Rust now". Rust, like any other language, takes years to stabilize. You just happen to see it happen in the open, whereas most other languages you get them at their 1.0 release.

>This may sound harsh, but it really doesn't matter what features and benefits Rust could potentially bring to the table if the lack of stability makes it unusable in practice today. A programming language that can't be seriously used might as well not even exist.

They could not give a flying duck about it being "seriously used today".

They'll start to care AFTER they release it as 1.0. They only released this 0.x versions to solicit ideas and improvements, not to get programmer's to adopt it.

Well, we aren't actually seeing stabilization when it comes to Rust.

Assuming this stabilization actually does happen, whether it happens in public or private is irrelevant.

What matters is that we've seen C++ stabilize. We've seen Go stabilize. We've seen Scala stabilize. And now we'll likely see Swift stabilize, well before Rust does. They are all serious competitors to Rust.

As these other languages continue to evolve, but at the same time remaining usable, the relevance of Rust will continually decrease. It may still have drawing power today. A few years from now, it will have less appeal.

I can't tell if you like Rust or hate it. If you hate it, and you are right, then it will simply fade away and your comments will serve nothing more than being able to say, "I told you so." If you are wrong, then you end up looking a bit silly.

If you like it, perhaps you should be a little patient and give the creators the benefit of the doubt. No one wants a Rust 3.0 fiasco.

It's hard to encounter language issues without implementing a large project in the language. I am happy that they're taking the time to let the implementation of Servo help inform the design of Rust.

This is silly. Rust is on a similar time frame to Go in terms of stabilization (~2.5 years after release).

It's hard to make a comparison against Swift, which is a proprietary language developed for years behind closed doors. Presumably they're at 1.0 from the first day by design. You can't do that with open source languages.

* Scala has been around since 2004 (public release) -- 10 years ago. (Not sure when the first stable release was but more than 3 years.) * Go in 2009 (public) -- 6 years ago. 1.0 (first stable release) was released in 2012 so it took 3 years to stabilize. * C++ in 1983 -- 31 years ago. ... It's been a long time. * Clojure in 2007 -- 7 years ago. The creator took 2 1/2 years before releasing it to the public. * Rust in 2012 -- 2 years ago.

It's pretty absurd to expect Rust to be stable right from the get go. The difference in all this is that most of those languages were closed before being released. Rust was open at a pretty early state.

You're probably right, but I think I've heard of Rust in public in 2010 and that it was started by Graydon in 2007.

Rust had been stewing around in Graydon's head for years, but he was never paid to work on it until 2009 (part-time, at that point). And he didn't have any paid employees to help him until 2010 (that would be pcwalton). And as far as I'm concerned, Rust development didn't actually start in earnest until mid-to-late 2011, when the compiler began bootstrapping. And the Rust that we know and love today didn't begin to take shape until 2012, when borrowed references started taking shape.

Personally, I consider the 0.1 release in January 2012 to mark Rust's "birthday". Everything prior to that was just gestation. :)

Swift isn't intended to be a systems language

FWIW, Swift is categorized as a systems language in the opening pages. But, then, so does Go in its FAQ. To Swift's credit, at least it has deterministic memory management through ARC.

While having some support for garbage collection is good, reference counting is not is a rather expensive way to implement that for applications. This becomes especially bad in multicores since it may dramatically increase the number of writes to shared object cache lines.

Wouldn't a lot of that be mitigated, though, by using tagged pointers in place of RC structs where possible? Seems like an obvious optimization.

Not really sure what the tag in the pointer would be used for. Could you give an example.

In general, reference counting has the problem that it needs to update the reference count. If you have a read-only data-structure these updates to the references will introduce writes that may severely impact performance since a write introduces cache consistency communication, while reads are communication-free.

Yeah, you're right. I didn't think it through when I asked. I conflated this scenario with the technique they use to put small objects like NSNumber on the stack.

> Swift isn't intended to be a systems language: it's an application language.

It may not be ready as a systems language in its pre-1.0 form, but the Swift book claims that it's "designed to scale gracefully from ‘Hello World’ to an entire operating system", so Apple appears to have big goals.

I'm thinking about starting the "Rust contributor points out how Rust is a systems language and $language is an applications language" drinking game. At least now they'll focus on Swift instead of Go. I don't mean this to be rude; I've just noticed a similar set of usernames in threads about certain !Rust languages playing the underdog position and always feeling like they need to compare.

Given Rust's PR, speaking of that -- not a thread about Go passes without at least three pcwalton comments these days -- I actually broke down and gave it a try. I wrote a little Hello World server and then got lambasted by a friend of mine for not working functionally, since, in his words, "Rust is a functional language and the fact that it supports other paradigms is a mistake." I rm -rf'd and ignore it for now, but I look forward to it stabilizing and maybe coming back to it.

Rust has potential but the PR needs to ease up just a little. There is room for more than one language in the world.

Sign me up for a "someone gets indignant about rust developers responding to other people's comments about rust" drinking game.

(small-time rust contributor here too)

I think you should look up what "indignant" means, then, for the benefit of all of us, demonstrate the anger in my comment that was not put there unconsciously by the reader.

Rust is not a functional programming language. Your friend is just wrong for taking you to task about that.

> not a thread about Go passes without at least three pcwalton comments these days

Well, every thread about Go inevitably has numerous comments comparing it to Rust, often erroneously, and pcwalton is one of the primary Rust developers.

A fair point.

Rust's raison d'être is memory safety without garbage collection. Swift requires garbage collection to achieve memory safety. (Reference counting is a form of garbage collection.)

In other words, Rust is about safety with zero overhead over C++, and Swift is not zero-overhead. So the people who need Rust are not going to use Swift for Rust's domains. That's fine, as Apple wanted a language for iOS and Mac app development with tight integration with Objective-C, and from what I've seen they've done a great job of developing one.

> Things might have been different had a stable, even if somewhat imperfect, initial version of Rust had been released by now, thus allowing it to gain some adoption and traction.

Why are you so insistent that we freeze an unsafe version of a language that's designed for safety?

> Why are you so insistent that we freeze an unsafe version of a language that's designed for safety?

Pacabel has made a career of complaining about Rust being unstable.

Are you honestly suggesting that Rust is stable at this point?

I think that the recent, and very disruptive, ~ and box changes should completely dispel that notion.

I'm merely pointing out the reality of the current situation, which some in the Rust community do not wish to acknowledge, for whatever reason. The situation has yet to change, so what I'm saying is still valid, and will remain so until some actual improvement does take place.

Now that we see yet another serious competitor in the form of Swift, what I've had to unfortunately be saying for some time now becomes more and more relevant. If Rust is to become relevant, it will need to be usable, and that will need to happen very quickly.

> Are you honestly suggesting that Rust is stable at this point?

No, he didn't say that anywhere.

No, I'm not suggesting that Rust is stable. It wasn't even slightly implied by what I said. I was just pointing out that you're a broken record on this topic, to the point of being a troll (you seem to just ignore the meat of any response you get and only focus on the current state of Rust).

To be crystal clear: no-one is suggesting that Rust is stable and no-one is suggesting it is ready for adoption (if they are, they are wrong). However, being unstable now is very very different to not ever being stable.

In any case, Swift is only tangentially a Rust competitor as kibwen demonstrated.

Resort to name-calling if you really must. None of that will change reality.

Rust is not stable, as you yourself have readily admitted. What I've unfortunately had to be pointing out for such a long time now is absolutely correct.

We've been told that we can expect Rust 1.0 by the end of the year. As each month passes, it becomes less and less likely that we will actually see this. We are still seeing significant change, even as recently as the past month.

I think Rust could potentially be very useful. But that requires stability, and that in turn is something that appears more and more elusive each day.

It's easy to say that Swift isn't a competitor to Rust, but the reality is that it is. And unlike Rust, it will very, very likely be usable for serious apps within a few months. It will see the adoption that Rust could have had, had it been usable, further reducing Rust's future changes.

What have you been pointing out for so long? That Rust is unstable? That many people/companies won't use Rust while it is unstable? That there are other languages people can use instead?

All of those are highly uncontroversial and universally acknowledged by experienced Rust users.

Also, I don't understand how you have lept from Rust being unstable now, to Rust never being stable.

A 1.0 release by the end of the year doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me; I think you are expecting more from it than what the Rust team is looking for (and have stated publicly repeatedly): stabilising the core language.

Of course, a stable release of that form will still mean some libraries may be unstable (and so that Rust would be unsuitable for many corporate developments). These libraries will be stabilised progressively and iteratively.

>Are you honestly suggesting that Rust is stable at this point? I think that the recent, and very disruptive, ~ and box changes should completely dispel that notion.

No, he merely suggests that you bored a lot of people by repeating that it's unstable, instead of accepting the fact and using something else.

If being unstable is that bad, then by all means, go and use a stable language.

I, and many others, do use something else. That's the big problem facing Rust, whether or not its creators wish to admit this fact.

There are numerous alternatives to Rust that offer many of its benefits, but they're usable today. We can rely on them today, tomorrow, and likely for some time to come.

And by this fall, we'll likely have Swift as yet another option to add to our growing list.

I think Rust has a lot of potential. But each month that goes by squanders that potential. It has less and less of a chance of making a real impact the longer it isn't usable, especially while its competitors keep evolving.

>I, and many others, do use something else. That's the big problem facing Rust, whether or not its creators wish to admit this fact.

Yeah, and I listen to Rihanna instead of Jay Farrar. Obviously that's the big problem Jay is facing, and he should sound more like Rihanna to cater to my taste.

At least he/she hasn't derailed the thread by complaining about every other project that Mozilla is working on. I count that as progress!

I think you may be aiming for a level of safety, or perhaps a notion of "perfection", that isn't practically obtainable.

The recent, and rather disruptive, box changes are a good example of this. We see change, and those of us with existing Rust code sure do feel the change, but very little convergence seems to be happening.

Based on past trends, I would not be at all surprised if problems are found with the new approach as it becomes more widely used, and some other approach is then attempted.

Wheel-spinning is something that can quite easily happen with ambitious software projects. It's not a new phenomenon. But when facing ever-increasing competition, and other real-world constraints, it's often better to aim slightly lower and at least be mostly usable in practice.

A memory-safe programming language that can't actually be used is pretty much irrelevant. It's better to accept some slight amount of imperfection if that means it can actually be used.

> I think you may be aiming for a level of safety, or perhaps a notion of "perfection", that isn't practically obtainable.

I believe it is, as the basic structure and rules of the borrow check (which is the part of Rust that's truly unique) have proven themselves to be quite usable. The usability problems remaining are implementation and precision (e.g. issue #6393), not big problems that will require large redesigns.

> The recent, and rather disruptive, box changes are a good example of this. We see change, and those of us with existing Rust code sure do feel the change, but very little convergence seems to be happening.

Yes, it is. The number of outstanding backwards incompatible language changes is decreasing. People who do Rust upgrades notice how the language is changing less and less.

> A memory-safe programming language that can't actually be used is pretty much irrelevant. It's better to accept some slight amount of imperfection if that means it can actually be used.

"Some slight amount of imperfection" means not memory-safe. Java didn't settle for that, C# didn't settle for that, Swift isn't settling for that, and we aren't settling for it.

This is an honest question: Why do you seem to care so much? Rust is in my view a great project, that yes isn't quite there yet but is making great progress. I'm looking forward to using it when it is stable, and pcwalton and the other contributors are developers that I've looked up to for a number of years: I have nothing but faith in them.

At the end of the day, if Rust fails, well that will be a shame. But I'm seeing nothing that shows that it might, so I'm truly struggling to understand why you seem so upset by a new modern language trying to tackle big problems in ways that have never been done before. That's a good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

Having been in industry for a long time, I think that something like Rust would be hugely beneficial. It very well could solve some very real problems.

I bring this up again and again because I'd rather not see Rust fail. I'd much rather see a slightly flawed Rust that's actually usable in the short term, rather than a continually changing Rust that nobody will seriously adopt.

Rust has been in development for years now. That's a very long time in the software industry. A few years of development time without a stable release is understandable. But it's getting beyond that now.

Rust isn't quite there yet, but each day it edges closer to a Perl 6 type of disaster. Perl 6 offered some intriguing ideas, but it just isn't usable, and that's a shame. Meanwhile, other competitors have arisen and blown past it, rendering it far less useful were it ever properly implemented.

Given the increasingly stiff competition that Rust is facing, I suspect we'll see it end up like Haskell or D. Something usable is eventually produced, but it never sees the truly widespread adoption that it could have seen, had it been usable earlier on. It's not as bad as Perl 6's situation, but it is still unfortunate.

> Given the increasingly stiff competition that Rust is facing, I suspect we'll see it end up like Haskell or D. Something usable is eventually produced, but it never sees the truly widespread adoption that it could have seen, had it been usable earlier on.

I don't have much to say about D, but the history of Haskell implied by this sentence is hilariously wrong.

Go watch Simon Peyton Jones' talk about the history of Haskell: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers.... As well as being wonderfully entertaining, it explains the actual history of Haskell: it was designed to be a language with which various academic groups could do functional programming language research. The fact that Haskell has gradually grown more popular and now has mainstream appeal and some industrial users is quite a surprise to its creators.

> Rust has been in development for years now. That's a very long time in the software industry. A few years of development time without a stable release is understandable. But it's getting beyond that now.

Not for programming languages. These take years and years. Take a stab at any of the most popular languages. They weren't created 1-3 years ago. It takes time, and that's a good thing.

reference counting != garbage collection. Garbage collection take CPU and lots of memory. Reference counting just ++ the pointer count on allocation, and -- on free. Essentially no overhead.

C++ moving to a 3 year standard cycle is a much bigger 'threat' to rust. But really, the fact that there's so much actual investment in improving mainstream languages from various well-funded sources is probably a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats kind of thing.

Yes, I do agree that the situation is improving across the board.

But as an industry, we need practical solutions that are available now, even if somewhat flawed. We need languages we can use today, and know that the code we write today will still compile fine next week and next year, if not a decade or more from now.

Modern C++ is getting pretty good at offering this, while offering far a greater degree of safety. Go isn't bad, either. Scala has its drawbacks, but it's often a reasonable option, too. The key thing to remember is that all of these languages have offered developers a stable target, and they are seriously usable in the present.

Given the announcement of Swift, and given that Apple will very likely deliver on it by the fall, we very well could see it becoming a major player during 2015.

The safety benefits that Rust could theoretically or potentially offer are virtually useless to huge swaths of the industry as long as the predictability of a stable release just isn't there. The longer this wait goes on, the better the competition becomes, and the less relevant Rust will unfortunately become in the long term.

> But as an industry, we need practical solutions that are available now, even if somewhat flawed. We need languages we can use today, and know that the code we write today will still compile fine next week and next year, if not a decade or more from now.

By this logic we shouldn't invent any new programming languages at all. There's no such thing as a "practical solution that's available now"; everything takes time to develop.

> Modern C++ is getting pretty good at offering this, while offering far a greater degree of safety. Go isn't bad, either. Scala has its drawbacks, but it's often a reasonable option, too. The key thing to remember is that all of these languages have offered developers a stable target, and they are seriously usable in the present.

You aren't going to use those languages if you want memory safety without garbage collection. Because they can't offer zero-overhead memory safety without breaking existing code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com