[libre-riscv-dev] benefits of rust

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 11:14 Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 10:13:06AM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
> wrote:
>
> >
> > 1). bad: it is seriously demeaning to use the phrase "non-paranoid" -
> > to ACCUSE potential users of rust of "being paranoid".  can i suggest,
> > jacob, raising that as a severe and high-priority issue with the rust
> > community to get that removed effective immediate?
>
> The whole point of rust is that its static checking is reassurance for
> the paranoid!
>

while that's true, Rust does have other benefits over languages such as
Python, JavaScript, Java, C#, C, and C++:
speed, consistency (no GC pauses), native execution, low memory usage,
basically nearly all the gotchas are caught by the compiler at compile-time
(unlike C and C++ and, to a lesser extent, other languages) so if it
compiles then it's likely to work, much more powerful type deduction, the
ability to extend the interface of any type, not needing all the special
cases that come with C++ constructors, vastly improved composability,
accessible and easy to use library ecosystem, very friendly community, much
easier to parallelize code, etc.

Static checking is not just for the paranoid, since the checking enables
programmers to make faster programs by using rust's composability to use
faster more complex algorithms that wouldn't be practically feasible to get
correct in a language such as C or Python.

Here's an example where someone was able to use b-trees instead of the
simpler avl trees because rust's checking and composability meant that it
wasn't extremely hard to get correct (as it would have been in C):
http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/09/28/the-relative-performance-of-c-and-rust/

Jacob