this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
62 points (98.4% liked)

Ask Lemmy

27006 readers
2472 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Title. I'm looking for a concrete answer for this.

top 16 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago

zig, kinda. You still have to manually manage memory, but for smaller applications there is e.g. the ArenaAllocator, which does everything for you. zig has a few nice features that make it just easier to manage memory. Keep in mind that it is not at release level and will change, but it's already functional.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (3 children)

None of the languages give the same runtime guarantees as Rust without having a garbage collector.

I think people in this thread are putting Rust in the same bucket as garbage-collecting languages, but there is a performance cost to garbage collecting. Rust doesn't have a garbage collector and this is why Rust is very fast and still can guarantee a lot of runtime errors won't happen (unlike in C, c++ etc).

But it's really complicated to write code in Rust. Not the basic code but if you have lifetimes on things or use async code and want to change it, you may have to spend hours reworking your entire program.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago

It would be really great to have some "Python layer" on top of Rust.

My current work is mostly data mangling web services (Java/Spring Boot) and there's simply no way I could convince anyone (including myself) that Rust is a viable alternative in terms of development speed.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Agree. I get very grumpy refactoring async rust. It's the only time at the point in my career that I think "what the fuck I don't know anything about anything I think I'm a lizard"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago

Async Rust has a long way to go. Eventually someone will figure out a decent abstraction. That'll be good.

[–] akkajdh999 5 points 14 hours ago

None of the languages give the same runtime guarantees as Rust without having a garbage collector.

If you only count mature languages. There's a lot of small immature languages. For example Inko.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

If you have to ask this question you should probably be using a garbage collected language. Manual memory management is quite tedious and it's easy to make mistakes. Rust's novel contribution is catching the mistakes at compile time so once you have fixed all the compile time error messages you have a safe program. But it doesn't ease the tedium that much.

GC does it automatically and is way more convenient, but inflicts a cost in runtime performance. That's almost always fine on today's computers, thus Python's popularity. Rust is best for systems work where you need more precise control of machine resources. It is probably used more than necessary right now, because it's new and exciting and programmers like that.

The safest language is probably Ada but it is less flexible than Rust. They are working on extending it to be comparable. Right now Ada isn't well suited for programs that do lots of runtime allocation.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Pretty much all high level languages do because they're already designed around automatic memory management.

[–] Dhs92 10 points 16 hours ago

Yeah, Rust is a special case because it handles almost everything at compile time. It also doesn't rely on garbage collecting like the majority of modern high level languages.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Almost every language does, do they not? Rust is special because it is safe and as fast as cpp

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

Came her to say this. Safe programming languages? Yes, plenty. Safe and low-level? Well, modern C++, kinda, if you do your homework and follow some rules. I don't know any other tbh.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago

Ada comes to mind, goes further than Rust in this regard.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago

I'd say Malbolge is pretty safe. I'd like to see someone crack a system using that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I mean Java and Python ig? But those don’t really count, do they?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

As someone who has used Python and Rust professionally, I'd say Python, while memory-safe, lacks proper type-checking. I don't know if there are alternatives, but Pylance is straight up trash. Also Python's performance doesn't even compare to Rust. It's a great scripting/programming language, but I think it's use cases are vastly different.

I'd say whether Python counts depends a lot on what you want to do. I have a very strong opinion on using Python for complex projects. When it comes to performance, it's suitable as nothing more than glue-code.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago

By popularity: Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, C#, Go, HTML, Mathematica, PHP, Shell, Lua, SAS, Kotlin, Ruby, Dart, R, Swift, Scala, Matlab. The only popular languages lacking memory safety are C and C++.