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Comment by voltagex_ | Hacker News Reader

Coming from C#, that syntax looks completely alien to me. I need to write a very small monitoring app to run on a tiny armel box so I may try Go. I will still miss Visual Studio's debugger, though.

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When I tried to write my first program in Rust, I failed miserably. With a strong background in C# as well, I tried to write a function that returns an interface (a trait in Rust), which was apparently not something you do in Rust. (With an unboxed trait that is, but there are some proposals to add support for this.) The compiler diagnostics have improved tremendously since then. I don’t think the syntax is that much different. You use `let` instead of `var` and types go after the argument instead of before.

After some time I got the hang of it, and I am sure you can do it too. It is surprising how much I _didn’t_ miss the Visual Studio debugger. The VS debugger is amazing and in my opinion there is no debugger that comes close, but Rust has a much higher “if it compiles it works”-factor than C#. There are still times where I wish for a debugger like that of Visual Studio, but this is relatively rare. Instead of spending time debugging, you spend your time staring at compiler errors in denial until you eventually accept that the compiler is right and your code is wrong.

Apparently Visual Rust [1] is a thing now. VS2015 will support GDB as a debugger, too (!)

[1]: https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/VisualRust

Go is shit. Trust me, Rust will suit you better. Coming from C# it will be a lot closer to what you're used to than the bizzaro-world of Go.

I'm not against you, but to convince, you need to tell why, why the sh*t? why to trust you?

Lack of a runtime exception model would be one huge thing. So you basically have to check for errors after every operation, and whatever errors you don't check for just... get lost.

Nonsense, go is fine, so is rust.

Both are really great. I think Go is better for servers and rust can be great on embedded and high performance applications.

The truth is that rust is in its infancy its all guesses at this point. Go didn't attract c++ people as people first guessed.

I saw them talking about that, but it's completely obvious.

Nobody today is running C/C++ unless they need either A) complete speed or B) bare metal. Go can't do either, so there was going to be very little transfer from C/C++ to Go.

C++ is still mostly what I use, but I need neither speed nor bare metal. Maybe add C) people doing UI and applications?

There aren't many other good options: Java: UI looks terrible; it's annoying living in Noun-land when CPUs are, if anything, more about verbs than nouns; and running properly on Windows is not trivial.

C#: Up until recently, not cross-platform unless you're ok with Mono. (But, might be worth looking in to now)

Python: great for scripts and experiments. The lack of static typing is a real problem when working with code other people wrote. Also, UI is not a strong point.

Go: what UI libraries? (I'm sure they exist)

Objective-C: even on iOS/Mac-only projects, I still prefer C++, because it's so much easier to use STL objects than NS data structures.

C++: you can pretty much get it done, and often you can use Qt to get it done quickly and cross-platformy.

I'm hoping Rust will be the C++ I always wanted.

Most GUI toolkits for Rust are in their infancy, but I hear that Gnome will be working on integrating Rust with GObject this year, which should allow Rust to leverage Gtk:

https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2015/BOFs/Rust

Some preliminary work towards this:

https://github.com/gi-rust/glib-sys

> I hear that Gnome will be working on integrating Rust with GObject this year, which should allow Rust to leverage Gtk:

This disappoints me greatly.

The idea of an object hierarchical GUI is not a guaranteed given. It causes things like "primary UI thread" which doesn't need to exist anymore. It is a reflection of a time when memory and CPU was more scarce.

In the face of massively parallel CPU's and huge memory, a tile-based, constraint GUI with publish-subscribe is probably a much better choice. This is especially true with a language that promotes concurrent programming.

I suspect, sadly, that we're simply going to continue down the same broken, single-threaded UI path because of the installed codebases.

I am a Qt/C++ programmer by day and i have been looking at rust and there some bindings to GTK and such, but to me, nothing really comes close to the cross platform-ness of Qt. There seem to be simple QML bindings for Rust too, but thats not really the same.

> Java: UI looks terrible

Java GUIs can be made to look quite nice, just many developers never spend the time to go beyond the default settings.

If anything, the old Filthy Rich Clients blog from Chet Haase , Romain Guy was full of examples how to achieve great UIs in Java.

However most 9to5ers don't read such sources of information.

I've been tempted to try getting rust going on some of the small arm micros I've got lying around. The memory safety would be tremendous boon for a lot of development there, same with the ownership/lifetime management. I think I'd probably have to strike most of the standard library but it'd still be really useful.

For me I keep seeing buffer overflows in router management stacks. It seems like rust would help protect routers from attack, while allowing low footprints.

Yea that's a common one I've done in a bunch of microcontroller things I've done. And there it's even more dangerous because you'll overflow the buffer, and change something and never have ANY idea you've done it until the consequences have happened. I ran into quite of few of those while setting up an allocator to get Lua running in <30k of ram without any floating point math.

Rust is likely to be popular for embedded work, where debugging is hard and crashing is often not tolerated.

Go is primarily for server-side web applications. That's Google's main business area, that's what they built it for, and that's where all the libraries are well-debugged.

I need more info than that.

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