Rust is Eating JavaScript
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JavaScript has its place as a lightweight runtime interpreter.
Rust has its place as a secure and modern way to engineer and produce dependable software.
Eh, it's not that lightweight, Lua is much better for that.
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Everything eventually becomes a crab.
That means eventually everything tastes great when smothered in butter.
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Yes it's on my infinite todo list. I'm just being too much of a curmudgeon about the available textbooks, and had a sinking feeling when the main one didn't get "hello world" out of the way on page 1, and shift to the specifics of the language.
Rust By Example is very good for showing the ropes in a very practical way, that's how I got up and running with it.
Secondly is the O’Reilly book Programming Rust, which is probably closer to what you want, it explains the actual technical details of much of the language, and to me seems written for an audience that already knows programming. Lastly would be Rust for Rustaceans by No Starch Press, if you actually do want to pursue Rust further, as it discusses very, very in detail the systems of the language, and how they can be used to make something so powerful like Serde.
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Rust By Example is very good for showing the ropes in a very practical way, that's how I got up and running with it.
Secondly is the O’Reilly book Programming Rust, which is probably closer to what you want, it explains the actual technical details of much of the language, and to me seems written for an audience that already knows programming. Lastly would be Rust for Rustaceans by No Starch Press, if you actually do want to pursue Rust further, as it discusses very, very in detail the systems of the language, and how they can be used to make something so powerful like Serde.
Thanks, Rust by Example looks ok, and I'm acquainted with one of Programming Rust's authors, which is cool. I'm currently looking at "Comprehensive Rust". All these though seem to be about the Rust software ecosystem (compilers, package tools, libraries) as much as they are about the language. I had hoped to start by just reading about the language, if something like that exists. I don't particularly want to write any Rust programs until I've finished reading some kind of language overview, which means that all the stuff about build tools are just a distraction during that stage. As another commenter in this thread said though, ecosystems and languages have become pretty much inseparable, so maybe that's why the books are that way.
This also looks interesting:
https://dr-knz.net/rust-for-functional-programmers.html
This says nothing about Rust, but it's a humorous classic. I'd be interested to know how to describe Rust in these terms.
https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html
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I think there's room for a rust-lite language that is GCed. Something with a functional-style type system and that compiles to machine code.
Roc is a candidate for this language. Basically Elm that compiles to machine code, but with a number of tweaks to make it work for more than just a web front end. Like Elm, the type system is haskell like, but simplified.
There’s already Swift, which isn’t garbage collected, but the ref. counting does the same in practice.
The only problem with Rust and Swift, Kotlin etc. in my opinion is that they keep growing and getting more complex with no signs of stopping.
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JS become rusty
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The JS tooling universe has always seemed like a Lovecraftian hellscape to me. I've managed to stay away from it so far, but if I were caught in it, of course I'd be trying to escape any way I could. It sounds like Rust's attraction here has been as a viable escape corridor rather than anything about Rust per se.
In particular, I get that everyone wants their code to be faster, and I get that certain bloaty apps (browsers) need to get their memory footprint under control, and a few niche areas (OS kernels, realtime control) can't stand GC pauses. Other than that though, what is the attraction of Rust for stuff like tooling? As opposed to a (maybe hypothetical) compiled, GC'd language with a good type system and not too much abstraction inversion (Haskell's weakness, more or less).
Has Golang fizzled? It has struck me as too primitive, but basically on the right track.
Rust seems neat from a language geek perspective, but from what I can tell, it requires considerable effort from the programmer handle a problem (manual storage reclamation) that most programs don't really have. I do want to try it sometime. So this post is intended as more inquisitive/head scratching rather than argumentative.
I usually pick Rust for CLI tools because:
- It's statically compiled and isn't dependent on system binaries and won't break if there if the system has the wrong version like C/C++, allowing you to distribute it as a single binary without any other installation steps
- Still produces fairly small binaries unlike languages like Java or C# (because of the VM)
- Is a modern language with a good build system (It's like night and day compared to CMake)
- And I just like how the language works (errors as values etc.)
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Can I just say how beautiful that page is? Such a delight to read the text on it. The legibility. The simplicity.
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I’ve used it the last few years to do Advent of Code (https://adventofcode.com/) and that’s been fun and challenging. Definitely recommend it. Better than trolling through a book of “now do this” examples if you’ve done other languages in the past.
I know that the "project" approach to learning a language works for some people, but I've found l greatly prefer to read a book from beginning to end before undertaking any projects. It helps me start out with a clear picture. I'm finding "Comprehensive Rust" to be fairly good so far. Thanks for all the help, everyone.
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JavaScript has its place as a lightweight runtime interpreter.
Rust has its place as a secure and modern way to engineer and produce dependable software.
with wasm and friendly new web frameworks, the only thing keeping js alive is inertia
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Fun fact! Lemmy is made in Rust!
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I thought python has kinda exploded lately...
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Because corporations doesn't want web to be open, everyone can javascript, not everyone can read webassembly.
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Is this a 2yo write up, considering the last update was in 2023?
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That means eventually everything tastes great when smothered in butter.
Eventually?
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Because corporations doesn't want web to be open, everyone can javascript, not everyone can read webassembly.
The minifiers have long made JavaScript just as indecipherable
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I usually pick Rust for CLI tools because:
- It's statically compiled and isn't dependent on system binaries and won't break if there if the system has the wrong version like C/C++, allowing you to distribute it as a single binary without any other installation steps
- Still produces fairly small binaries unlike languages like Java or C# (because of the VM)
- Is a modern language with a good build system (It's like night and day compared to CMake)
- And I just like how the language works (errors as values etc.)
- It's statically compiled and isn't dependent on system binaries and won't break if there if the system has the wrong version like C/C++, allowing you to distribute it as a single binary without any other installation steps
You can do that with C++ too.
- Still produces fairly small binaries unlike languages like Java or C# (because of the VM)
I mean, the jars are actually pretty small; but also I really don't get the storage argument. I mean we live in a world where people happily download a 600 MB discord client.
- Is a modern language with a good build system (It's like night and day compared to CMake)
Meson exists ... as do others.
- And I just like how the language works (errors as values etc.)
Fair enough; though why? What's wrong with exceptions?
I work in a code base where I can't use exceptions because certain customers can't use exceptions, and I regularly wish I could because errors as values is so tedious.
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Can browsers run rust in the front end instead of javascript, or is it limited to transpile time and backend?
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Can browsers run rust in the front end instead of javascript, or is it limited to transpile time and backend?
Sort of, browsers can run rust code through webassembly. But i dont think this is a full replacement for JavaScript as of yet.
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The minifiers have long made JavaScript just as indecipherable
You can deminify, decompiling is a bit harder.
