Comment by WD-42
4 months ago
This argument goes only so far. Would you consider querying a database hard? Most developers would say no. But it’s actually a pretty hard problem, if you want to do it safely. In rust, that difficultly leaks into the crates. I have a project that uses diesel and to make even a single composable query is a tangle of uppercase Type soup.
This just isn’t a problem in other languages I’ve used, which granted aren’t as safe.
I love Rust. But saying it’s only hard if you are doing hard things is an oversimplification.
Building a proper ORM is hard. Querying a database is not. See the postgres crate for an example.
Querying a database while ensuring type safety is harder, but you still don't need an OEM for that. See sqlx.
Sqlx is completely lacking in the query composability department, and leads to a very large amount of boilerplate.
You can derive FromRow for your structs to cut down the boilerplate, but if you need to join two tables that happen to have a column with the same name it stops working, unless you remember to _always_ alias one of the columns to the same name, every time you query that table from anywhere (even when the duplicate column names would not be present). If a table gets added later that happens to share a column name with another table? Hope you don't ever have to join those two together.
Doing something CRUD-y like "change ordering based on a parameter" is not supported, and you have to fall back to sprintf("%s ORDER BY %s %s") style concatenation.
Gets even worse if you have to parameterize WHERE clauses.
You don't need to derive anything, sqlx creates structs with the query results for you. The rest of your complaints are just the natural consequence of SQL's design. sqlx is no more difficult to use than similar libraries in other languages.
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My feeling is that rust makes easy things hard and hard things work.
I'm not going to deny your experience. But is Rust really that hard? It's a very smooth experience for me - sometimes enough for me to choose it instead of Python.
I know that the compiler complains a lot. But I code with the help of realtime feedback from tools like the language server (rust-analyzer) and bacon. It feels like 'debug as you code'. And I really love the hand holding it does.
"Hard" maybe the wrong word.
Tasks that are simple in most other languages, like a tree that can store many data types, are going to take a lot more code and a lot more thinking to get it to work in rust.
Generics and traits have some rough edges. If I rub up against them, they're really annoying. Otherwise, if I can avoid those then I agree with you that rust is smooth, and the trade off is worth it.
> This just isn’t a problem in other languages I’ve used, which granted aren’t as safe.
Most languages used with DBs are just as safe. This idea about Rust being more safe than languages with GC needs a rather big [Citation Needed] sign for the fans.