Comment by durandal1
3 years ago
After four months, only 50% of the developers though they were as productive in Rust as other language. Given that the respondents are arguably a very capable group of engineers, this doesn't seem that great for any company looking to adopt Rust.
Consider an alternative reading:
50% of developers think they are as productive in a language they have four months of practice with as they are in a language they have fourteen years of practice with.
50% of developers think they are as productive in a high-performance bit-bashing-capable language as they are in a high-level glue language.
The people in this statistic are switching from languages they have years or sometimes decades of productivity in, and they're switching from languages like python and go and java. I see a lot of programmers who do similar switches never reaching productivity parity with C or C++. 50% of devs getting there in 4 months is amazing.
I am willing to bet that the type system and the opinionated way of doing things helps a lot here.
Anecdata but I found myself very productive with Haskell when I was learning it for grad school, to the point where I knew that if it compiled, it was most likely right.
I had similar experiences though not to that degree with Rust with very little time spent on it in comparison to Haskell. I feel a lot more comfortable sleeping at night over C or Python.
> Anecdata but I found myself very productive with Haskell when I was learning it for grad school, to the point where I knew that if it compiled, it was most likely right.
I recently told this to someone. The very next day my Elm code compiled just fine but it had three relatively tricky logical bugs which took me two hours to find and fix.
This was a rare enough occurrence that I remember it. Higher cosmic powers took note of my praise of strong typing and decided to teach me a lesson.
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"Anecdotally, these ramp-up numbers are in line with the time we’ve seen for developers to adopt other languages, both inside and outside of Google."
"Overall, we’ve seen no data to indicate that there is any productivity penalty for Rust relative to any other language these developers previously used at Google."
At a past job we generally saw about 6 months until devs hit their stride and worked that into our hiring plans. We usually had them committing small, targeted changes within a week or two. They could usually take on tasks relatively independently in one of our simpler code bases after about 2 months. So this checks out.
Weird enough we saw more junior devs pick it up faster. They had less preconceived notions and practices to unlearn and more willing to trust rustc. It's just that when they hit their stride they are still less productive than the senior devs.
As an older dev:
> They had less preconceived notions and practices to unlearn and more willing to trust rustc.
this is really what I experiences: rust told me a thing or two about coding I never realized. And it took me pretty long to accept that :-)
Big same. I remember being not being able to share a reference to something allocated on the stack at the start of main to a background thread. I was like "come on, of course its safe. That was allocated before the thread was spawned. It's main. When it returns the application exits"
But rustc's error messages helped it click that there might be a race condition on when the application returns from main and the background thread terminates. So it really needs to have the static life time to be safe. It's a small subtle thing but depending on the application it could lead to real bugs. I've definitely written variations of that bug in C before. A newer dev would have just accepted that flat out without arguing.
I've found Rust useful to study while I'm doing my primary job in C++.
A lot of the features Rust offers regarding traits and types can be emulated in C++ with templates, but the way C++ does it is far more obfuscated. Seeing the same thing implemented in Rust helped me wrap my head around what some complicated template nestings were doing ("Oh, this is implementing traits!") in our C++ code.
Four months to become as proficient in a memory safe, data race safe, and high performance language as in other languages seems like an astonishing accomplishment.
In fact it's frankly unbelievable, I'd have to imagine these guys are coming from a C++ background.
Anecdotally, C++ developers often have a harder time coming to Rust than folks from a more scripty background. They have to unlearn things, and that can be harder than learning things.
You can see similar opinions expressed in this thread, like here, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36496654
Python programmers love Rust: - Lots of compilation errors, but then the code does what it says - Fast! That gives an immediate benefit that people coming from C++ don't see.
Really? Coming from C++, learning Rust felt very natural and welcome because it put a name and a structure to the mental model I had been using to keep a semblance of sanity while doing C++. Maybe learning primarily with C++11 was a factor?
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I don't think it has to be this hard to have memory safety, data race safety, and performance. After building and doing PL design in this space for a decade, I don't believe the assumption that Rust's or C++'s difficulties are inherent.
I think C++ has its own legacy difficulties (which also make transitioning to memory safety tricky), and Rust's choice of borrow checking is only one (sometimes difficult) technique for getting these aspects. But there are almost a dozen other methods out there for getting memory safety besides RC, GC, or borrow checking.
I rather think that these other approaches aren't mature enough yet to enter the mainstream, and we haven't seen them yet.
How do you build a data race safe language without taking on the restriction of immutable data (which is imo, a much worse and bigger tradeoff than the borrow checker)?
I actually really like the borrow checker as a tradeoff, I think it makes code much easier to understand and it makes all aliasing bugs impossible. The removal of aliasing bugs is I think an undersold benefit of using rust.
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Please demonstrate a practical and memory safe systems programming language without borrowing.
I'd be delighted to see it, because right now I am not aware of any practical way to have memory safe regions without static tracking of borrowing from these regions. It's either that or runtime checking.
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Gah! Typo there. It's over 50% (66.8%) in 2 months. And over 80% in 4 months. The chart is correct, not the text :facepalm:
I'll see about whether I can push an update. Thanks for the catch!
Actually, it's complicated stuff pulling together two data points: 1) 2/3 of people are confident contributing in 2 months or less 2) And 50% of people are AS PRODUCTIVE IN RUST as they were in their other language within four months
Given that #2 is talking about people who are all professional programmers and where only a small percentage of respondents previously knew Rust, that's pretty amazing to me.
The more relevant claim is that they don't observe a difference in learning rust vs learning other languages. There is always a learning cost when adopting a new language that few people always know.
This sort of surprised me, because rust felt a lot harder for me personally to learn than Go. But data is far more valuable than an anecdote so there you go!
The article states, in the following sentence: “Anecdotally, these ramp-up numbers are in line with the time we’ve seen for developers to adopt other languages, both inside and outside of Google”
I've been studying C++ over 15+ years and still don't feel very productive thanks to the fear of getting paged every releases.
Does Rust give guarantees around paging? Is Rust similar to C++ in that respect?
FWIW, I believe the person you are replying to means "paged" as in "an alert was sent to my pager at 3AM that the entire system is down and I need to wake up and fix it", not the paging in/out of memory.
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At least you won't get paged due to some weird memory bugs. Yes, this happens quite frequently. Worse, it's usually not something local to a single change but interaction across seemingly safe changes.
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Only four months to become as productive in a new language as in a language they have years or even decades of experience in?
Sounds incredible.
I don't think that's bad, but it's a big stretch to say 50% at four months debunks the myth of six months.
50% seems pretty good to me