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.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Eh, it's not that lightweight, Lua is much better for that.
with wasm and friendly new web frameworks, the only thing keeping js alive is inertia
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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 the Rust question is intended as more inquisitive/head scratching rather than argumentative.
I think once you get into rust you just have a hard time going back, and it doesn't feel "hard" anymore. I can practically rust as easily as I can python for scripting and for API servers.
Rust really only gets hard when doing library development IMO. That's when you need lifetimes and well chosen types. But that's also why Rust libraries are superb.
I had the impression Rust doesn't handle concurrency particularly well, at least no better than Python, which does it badly (i.e. with colored functions). Golang, Erlang/Elixir, and GHC (Haskell) are way better in that regard, though they each have their own unrelated issues. I had believed for a while that Purescript targeting the Erlang VM and with all the JS tooling extirpated might be the answer, but that was just a pipe dream and I don't know if it was really workable.
Rust makes multi threading very easy you can just use
thread::spawn();
But rust makes Async difficult because it's naturally stackless so you need to create your own scheduler or use someone else's like Tokio. Also, people have a bad habit of conflating async with concurrency which makes it more confusing.
Sure you can spawn threads but now you have all the hazards of shared memory and locks, giving the 2.0 version of aliasing errors and use-after-free bugs. Also, those are POSIX threads, which are quite heavyweight compared to the in-process multitasking of Golang etc. So I would say that's not really an answer.
Go routines are certainly special and hard to match, but rust has all the normal abstractions of a language like C, just with a borrow checker so you can avoid memory leaks, write after read, etc.
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Purescript targeting the Erlang VM
Have you tried Gleam?
No I haven't, I'll take a look at it, though I felt suspicious of "task.async" as shown on the front page of gleam.run.
I don't know but I don't think rust has that problem. In fact I've always thought its data ownership paradigm is literally the most optimal approach to concurrency and parallelism. I really love using rayon in rust for instance.
True, but of course it's always a trade-off. At a certain point I have to defer to your judgment, at least until I've written some Rust code. But I've written a fair amount of C++ and a little bit of Ada and don't find them all that convenient compared to Python or Haskell or whatever. We'll see. ;)
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- Rust is the best language for writing WASM in, so you can write Rust and run it in the browser without transpiling to JS.
- Rust isn't just about speed or GC pauses. Its type system is amazing and allows you to encode things that you cannot in any other mainstream language.
- It's so incredibly well designed, it fewla like that clip from Ricky and Morty where Morty feels what standing on a truly even plane feels like then has a panic attack when he leaves. Rust rethought everything from scratch, and isn't just some new syntax or fancy compiler tricks. No null, no exceptions, no inheritance, new typing capabilities, etc.
Go made some pretty poor design choices, and now even Google is choosing Rust for a lot of stuff instead.
Thanks, and interesting point about Wasm if that is important. You can also compile C++ to wasm but then its C++ ;). I don't know about Ada to Wasm.
I don't think Rust is quite mainstream yet either. My impression is that its type system has not caught up with Haskell's except in a few areas, but of course nobody pretends Haskell is mainstream. I haven't yet tried Idris.
Golang seems to have a decent runtime model (lightweight threads, GC) though the language itself is underpowered. There is a Golang backend for Purescript that sounded interesting to me. The thing that turned me off the most about Purescript was the JS tooling. Purescript (purescript.org) is/was a Haskell-like language that transpiles to JS, intended for use in browsers, but Typescript filled this space before Purescript got much traction. That felt unfortunate to me.
I don't think HLL (high level language) has an official definition, but informally to me it has generally meant that the language is GC'd and that the native integer type is unbounded (bignum). By that standard, Rust and Ada are low level. I've so far thought of Rust as a modernized Ada with curly braces and more control of dynamic memory reclamation. Maybe there is more going on than that. Ada is still ahead of Rust in some ways, like generic packages, but Rust is working on that.
If you have a suggestion of a no-nonsense Rust book, I'd be interested in looking at it. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ beat around the bush way too long before discussing the language, but I guess I should spend more time with it.
I'd say Rust is definitely mainstream. Obviously not the level of JS or Python, but it's being used all over the place. All FAANG companies, the Linux kernel, JS runtimes, web browsers, Android, Signal, Mullvad...
IMO GC has nothing to do with high or low level. It's just incidental that there's a correlation. In GC you usually don't need to think about manually allocating or deallocating memory or truly understand what pointers are (in some ways anyway). In C / C++ you do.
In Rust you almost never manually allocate or deallocate, and you have both very high and low level APIs.
I'd say Rust is both high and low level. It just depends what you use it for. If you want to build a CLI or a web server, it's great for that. If you want to do kernel stuff and choose to flip bits around you can do that too.
As for books, maybe you'd like trying Rustlings instead.
Thanks, Rustlings doesn't sound like what I want either. I was hoping for a counterpart of Stroustrup's C++ Reference Manual, or Riehle's "Ada Distilled" or even K&R's book on C. Something that systematically describes the language rather than distractions like the toolchain, mini projects, cutesey analogies, etc. I'm being too persnickity though, mostly because it hasn't been important to me so far.
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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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Maybe give it a try; it's my favorite language to write programs in now, it has an extremely good standard library, and for everything else there's a mass of high quality crates, its build system is actually competent and makes compiling on Windows or Linux trivial, plus many, many more quality of life features.
If Rust had been around when I was an underclassman, I would have been totally locked into the full CompSci track. Instead, I got introduced to Java and C (and calculus…) and that looked like a nightmare compared to what I had been playing with in JS/Python land, so I noped on out of there and got a Comp Sci Lite degree.
Years later, I’m just completely in love with Rust.
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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.
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
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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Has Golang fizzled? It has struck me as too primitive, but basically on the right track.
My biggest issue with Golang by far is the close tie to Google. They are not our friendly innovator, time and time again they make decisions that will help them earn more ad money, and nothing else. And they have a lobg history of releasing something and then never fix the issues with it, and then more or less abandon it.
Other than that there are afaik some other issues with go, I'm not an expert but from what I hear the GC is quite aggressive and you can't tell it to run when you want. Doing something time sensitive? Well, bad luck. GC time!
True about Google ;). Yes, there are programs that really don't want GC. I consider those to mostly be niche applications since most of us are fine with using e.g. Python, which has automatic storage management (won't quibble about whether it is GC per se) that has occasional pauses. SImilarly, tons of important programs are written in Java, which is GC'd. Of course Java is tied up with Oracle just like Go is tied up with Google.
Go's main problem from what I can tell is that the language itself is too old fashioned. I've used it but am not expert. It feels like an improved version of C, rather than a modern, type-safe language.
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The JS tooling universe has always seemed like a Lovecraftian hellscape to me.
That's most of any programming of today for me.
If it can't be grasped in a couple of days - then na-ah.
I can patch something I need working which doesn't, written in C.
autotools ftw
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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Nom nom nom
Everything eventually becomes a crab.
That means eventually everything tastes great when smothered in butter. 🤤
Eventually?
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Thank god.
Guten Appetit!
Can browsers run rust in the front end instead of javascript, or is it limited to build time and backend stuff?
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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. 😙👌
groovy.
No, Groovy is JVM, not JavaScript.
JS getting rusty