alt Hacker NewsHigh-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain
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F# but not Scala? In TFA F# is only lacking in community and ecosystem. Scala is comparable in popularity to Go or Rust and has access to the entire Java ecosystem and JVM runtime. That should give it the five stars the author is looking for but its not considered.
I think a lot of devs are missing out by not considering Scala 3. I use it with the Zio effect system which brings composable concurrency and transactional memory amongst other features. I don't think there is anything comparable in any of the languages listed in TFA.
I also kind of wish Rust had a two-tier system where you could opt into (or out of) the full thing.
The lighter version he describes would make some assumptions that reduce not just the mental overhead but importantly the _syntax_ overhead. You cant have Arc<dyn Animal> if what you describe is an Animal and the readability is infinitely more important than performance. But if you could create a system where in the lighter Swift/C#-like syntax things are automatically cloned/boxed while in the heavier Rust they aren’t, then maybe you could use Rust everywhere without a syntax tax.
Based on your description, I think a good library for data structures that are intended to be used immutably would help with some pain points. Something with copy on write support or something like that. It's a powerful style, used it in haskell and it prevents a large class of bugs, almost down to just business logic bugs, which is what you want.
I like the style you're describing, thanks for sharing.
C# has indeed finally gained sum types this year… in preview. We’ll see if anything makes it into C#15 but they’re closer than they’ve ever been.
Regarding TypeScript:
> but types lie at runtime (unsound) requiring you to add your own runtime checks.
I don't recall doing that outside of situations when data is crossing system boundaries.
The vast majority of languages have an unsound type system, yet people are productive in them.
Over the years I've come to realise it's a form of nitpicking. You absolutely need it in some applications, but it's not an important requirement most of the time and it's given undue importance by some.
Crystal lang deserves a look given the article writer’s preferred language attributes. It has OO paradigms, elegant composability, efficient codegen etc.
Since programming is increasingly offloaded to LLMs and English is the main way engineers interact with code, it's interesting to see how LLMs reason in different programming languages.
In our benchmarking, we've found LLMs perform comparably between languages for one-shot coding submissions, slightly favoring more popular languages. But if you give frontier LLMs a harness and let them iterate / fix compilation errors, they actually significantly outperform in Rust. Meaning, they come up with more insightful ideas when developing Rust, than for example Javascript.
Scroll down to the language comparison chart: https://gertlabs.com/?agentic=agentic
I agree that rust devx is a bit lacking (not much though tbh), and that as the article suggests, structuring your project in a way to ensure invalid states simply cannot be represented is "the way." However, the assessment of other languages limitations seem a bit off to me, or at least I'm not grokking what they're claiming (a "me" problem in that case.)
What does "types in typescript are lies" even mean? Typescript from my experience has a fairly robust typing system with union types etc that many other languages called out lack (java, etc)
Is it a "lie" because it compiles to js? Compiler guarantees still stand regardless of whether you target IR, bare metal CPU instructions, etc. "any" types are definitely a foot gun, sure, but it I wouldn't call ts' type system a "lie" and not explain what that means. The ts language and ecosystem definitely has it warts, but in general those warts aren't the type system.
EDIT: correction, turns out I was fooled by ts lies all along. They allow clear type violations in several cases by design as pointed out elsewhere in this thread. Shame on them I guess. That said I've been using typescript in strict mode heavily for a year and it's good enough. Apparently there are some knarly edge cases hiding around several corners...yikes
It is called OCaml.
It is absolutely bizarre to not check DevX for Rust, it was literally the most loved programming language for years according to SO surveys.
Java is a fine language and has sufficiently expressive types. It's the most consistently overlooked language and frankly it's completely annoying. Java is a powerhouse. If you can live with a VM, it's an amazing language. The disdain for Java is honestly just weird. The boiler plate is only marginally annoying to write and makes it considerably easier to read. The 'enterprise ecosystem' is definitely bloat, but that's not Java.
Isn’t this “high level rust” idea similar to swift?
Everything is ARC. Clones are cheap. But you still have a reasonable sound type system and no garbage collection.
I get it. Tooling on swift is meh the further you are from Apple, so I’m not suggesting it’s better.
But from a language point of view; is it not essentially a high level rust?
Ps. I don’t really know swift. Just asking where/why I’m wrong really.
When someone mentions High-level rust, gleam comes to my mind. Although the language is functional and not OOP, but at-least from the perspective of type-system its well written and it can also hook into the elixir/erlang ecosystem.
No code examples? Wtf?
If you want to see high level rust, check out Dioxus. It's a web framework, and it's extremely React-like both in architecture but also ergonomics. I actually had AI migrate a JS project to Dioxus and I think it was something like 75% of the code. Pretty decent for a "low level" language.
Most of the Rust code I've read is arc-mutex-slop.
What this optimizes for is not actually having to deal with the pain in the ass that proper Rust is, but still allowing you to be in the cool kids club writing "blazingly fast software", all while writing what's pretty much Java or C#, but with a terrible non-functional garbage collector instead of a state of the art one.
Is this another AI article? What is said about Rust here has been said over and over again, and this brings nothing new to the table. They also always seem to be writing from a place of ignorance. If you're writing "high level Rust" the use of clone or Arc or whatever is negligible. If you're writing an HTTP service, your clone will be so fast it will make literally zero difference in the scope of your IO bound service.
Another observation is developer experience. Again, have you written _any_ Rust? I would argue that the reason Rust is such a joy to use is that the compile time errors are amazing, the way docs are handled are amazing, and so on. I know the eco system for something like Typescript is worlds better, but have you ever tried to _really_ understand what shenanigans are going on behind the scenes on some random hook from say, React? Their docs are so dismal and sparse and make assumptions on what they think you should know. Rust? You go to the doc gen, read what they think you should know as an overview, and if it isn't enough, I can click on "source" to dive deeper. What more could I possibly want?
Perhaps I'm just triggered. The discussion on Rust always seems to be fad or hype driven and almost always have very little to do with how it is to actually use it. If I have to read about compile times, again, I'm going to scream. Of all the languages I've used, it is one of the best in terms of a mature project needing new features or refactors. This is mentioned in some articles, but mostly we hear about "velocity" from some one dimensional perspective, usually someone from the web space, where it is arguable if the person should even bother trying to use Rust in the first place.
Apologies for the rant, but at this point I think Rust as a buzz word for article engagement has become tiring because it seems clear to me that these people aren't _actually_ interested in Rust at all. Who gives a shit what someone on Reddit thinks of your use of clone??
I program almost all languages except C# and Rust haha.
So someone looking for the perfect languages while actively using the only two languages I actively avoid is very strange to me.
C# has close to zero community and only really works properly in Windows which is far past its glory days. Except for Microsoft aggressively pushing it as a Java alternative it has no right to exist.
Rust is an overcomplicated subset of C++ that solved memory problems the most recent versions of C++ don't have anymore, and only survives by aggressive marketing, full of grouping things together that don't belong together, like C/C++. And memory safety / use-after-free.
If C and C++ are basically the same because they have access to manual memory allocation then Rust/PHP are also basically the same.
And Rust's borrow checker only solves use-after-free which statistically are 10% of memory related vulnerabilities. Not "memory safety" of which 60-70% is just array out of bounds.
Really the worst two languages that both only survive in aggressive marketing.
I agree that the rust community frowns a little too much on the use of Arc/Cloning/Box. If you use swift, everything is ref counted, why subject yourself to so much pain for marginal gain.
Tutorials and books should be more open about that, instead of pushing complex lifetime hacks etc., also show the safe and easy ways.
The article gives Java a worse devx rank than Go and I can't agree. Java is at least on par with go in every aspect of devx, and better in IDE support, expressiveness, and dependency mgmt.