Comment by pcwalton
9 months ago
Oh, come on, we're yet again extrapolating from "Rust is bad at rapid iteration on an indie game" to "Rust is bad at everything". If Rust were really that astoundingly unproductive of a language, then so many developers at organizations big and small wouldn't be using it. Our industry may be irrational at times, but it's not that irrational.
> Oh, come on, we're yet again extrapolating from "Rust is bad at rapid iteration on an indie game" to "Rust is bad at everything".
I am saying that Rust development has a lower velocity than mainstream GC'ed languages (Java, C#, Go, whatever).
I didn't think that you are disputing this claim; if you are disputing this, I'd like to know why you think otherwise.
> I am saying that Rust development has a lower velocity than mainstream GC'ed languages (Java, C#, Go, whatever).
It depends what you measure
For software that must get it right Rust can be more productive. The early cycles of development are slow, especially for people who have not surrendered to the borrow checker, yet. But the lack of simple mistakes, or more accurately the compiler's early detection of simple mistakes dramatically speeds up development
But in a lot of software those mistakes, whilst important, will not "crash the aeroplane ", so it is not worth that extra cost in the early cycles
I am not a game developer, or player, but games are in that category I think
> I am saying that Rust development has a lower velocity than mainstream GC'ed languages (Java, C#, Go, whatever).
That's not what you said: you said you're going to be less productive in Rust than nearly any other language, not "mainstream GC'd languages".
> I didn't think that you are disputing this claim; if you are disputing this, I'd like to know why you think otherwise.
Depending on the domain, I am disputing that, because of things like the Cargo ecosystem, easy parallelism, ease of interop with native code, etc. There is no equivalent to wgpu in other languages, for example.
> That's not what you said: you said you're going to be less productive in Rust than nearly any other language, not "mainstream GC'd languages".
I feel that you're selectively reading only what you have talking points to respond to.
Here is exactly what I said:
> Unless you are writing something in which any GC time other than 0ns is a dealbreaker, and any bug is also a dealbreaker, you're going to be less productive in Rust than almost any other language.
I mean, I literally carved out an exception use-case for Rust; viz for software that can't handle GC.
I wrote a single sentence with a single point, not a a single point diluted over multiple paragraphs. You have to literally read only half-sentences to interpret my point the way you did.
If you aren't going to even bother reading full sentences, why bother engaging at all?
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