Comment by IgorPartola
19 hours ago
Rust is also a systems language. I am still wrapping my mind around why it is so popular for so many end projects when its main use case and goals were basically writing a browser a maybe OS drivers.
But that’s precisely why it is good for developer tools. And it turns out people who write systems code are really damn good at writing tools code.
As someone who cut my teeth on C and low level systems stuff I really ought to learn Rust one of these days but Python is just so damn nice for high level stuff and all my embedded projects still seem to require C so here I am, rustless.
If python's painpoints don't bother you enough (or you are already comfortable with all the workarounds,) then I'm not sure Rust will do much for you.
What I like about Rust is ADTs, pattern matching, execution speed. The things that really give me confidence are error handling (right balance between "you can't accidentally ignore errors" of checked exceptions with easy escape hatches for when you want to YOLO,) and the rarity of "looks right, but is subtly wrong in dangerous ways" that I ran into a lot in dynamic languages and more footgun languages.
Compile times suck.
I rarely if ever encounter bugs that type checking would have fixed. Most common types of bugs for me are things like forgetting that two different code paths access a specific type of database record and when they do both need to do something special to keep data cohesive. Or things like concurrency. Or worst of all things like fragile subprocesses (ffmpeg does not like being controlled by a supervisor process). I think all in all I have encountered about a dozen bugs in Python that were due to wrong types over the past 17 years of writing code in this language. Maybe slightly more than that in JS. The reason I would switch is performance.
Same. I like the type hints -- they're nice reminders of what things are supposed to be -- but I've essentially ~never run into bugs caused by types, either. I've been coding professionally in Python for 10+ years at this point.
It just doesn't come up in the web and devtools development worlds. Either you're dealing with user input, which is completely untrusted and has to be validated anyways, or you're passing around known validated data.
The closest is maybe ETL pipelines, but type checking can't help there either since your entire goal is to wrestle with horrors.
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I write scripts in rust as a replacement for bash. Its really quite good at it. Aside from perl, its the only scripting language that can directly make syscalls. Its got great libraries for: parsing, configuration management, and declarative CLIs built right into it.
Sure its a little more verbose than bash one-liners, but if you need any kind of error handling and recovery, its way more effective than bash and doesn't break when you switch platforms (i.e. mac/bsd utility incompatibilities with gnu utilities).
My only complaint would be that dealing with OsString is more difficult than necessary. Way to much of the stdlib encourages programmers to just do "non-utf8 paths don't exist" and panic/ignore when encountering one. (Not a malady exclusive to rust, but I wish they'd gotten it right)
Example I had handy: <https://gist.github.com/webstrand/945c738c5d60ffd7657845a654...>
Paths are hard because they usually look like printable text, but don't have to be text. POSIX filenames are octet strings not containing 0x2F or 0x00. They aren't required to contain any "printable" characters, or even be valid text in any particular encoding. Most of the Rust stdlib you're thinking of is for handling text strings, but paths aren't text strings. Python also has the same split between Pathlib paths & all other strings.
I mean, you can always replace Python with LuaJIT or Perl... or Nim... or Crystal... or Odin... or with Rust....