
Why the developers who use Rust love it so much - ayoisaiah
https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/06/05/why-the-developers-who-use-rust-love-it-so-much/?cb=1
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plerpin
I've read the Rust book, maintained someone else's Rust code once, and written
a few of my toy programs. But I find that idiomatic Rust is difficult to grok.
All the constructs required for safety seem to obfuscate the control flow.
There also seems to be a weird schizophrenic combination of imperative and
functional styles in idiomatic Rust.

~~~
oconnor663
> All the constructs required for safety seem to obfuscate the control flow

A couple thoughts on this point, speaking as an admitted Rust fan:

\- A lot of this has gotten better since "non-lexical lifetimes" were
stabilized. In particular, it used to be somewhat common to need extra pairs
of nested curly braces, to convince the borrow checker that some reference
you'd taken really wasn't going to be used again. But today that is almost
never necessary.

\- In some cases, I find Rust's safety-oriented APIs clearer and nicer than
their equivalents in other languages. For me, the big one is Mutex<T>. In
Rust, a Mutex is a _container_ , and you can only access its contents by
locking it. It's _impossible_ to forget to lock a Mutex when you access the
thing it protects.

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zozbot234
Discussed before at:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23437202](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23437202)
Should be flagged as a dupe.

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zx14
Does Rust have a reach outside the C/C++ section of the market? Or is it only
popular in its own bubble, where developers are now excited to see many of
their once painful problems now fixed?

~~~
gameswithgo
a lot of ruby people are into it, and there is some Go crossover.

a lot of us who don’t like that almost every new language turned into a jitted
or interpreted universe like Go and Rust

~~~
zx14
I can see the crossover with Go, but Ruby?! What is the reason behind its
attractiveness in the Ruby community?

I get that some developers believe that Rust is "better than Ruby" and that
Rust has far more momentum, but their use cases are very different.

~~~
jkachmar
Steve Klabnik and Sean Griffin were both early adopters of Rust (and are now
fairly visible members of the community), and I believe that helped sow the
seeds of the language in parts of the Ruby community [0].

I think Rust managed to also cultivate a community that was very much like
Ruby’s [1], which brought people over.

[0] cf. Klabnik’s “Rust for Rubyists”

[1] mostly being very “people-oriented” in terms of inclusivity and
documentation, as well as putting effort into ensuring that the language and
its tooling provide a lot of “developer happiness”

~~~
steveklabnik
Don't forget Yehuda Katz.

Fundamentally, I don't think it should be surprising that someone who loves
Ruby would look at Rust. That it's very different is the entire point! Why
learn something that's extremely similar, that won't expand what you can do
very much?

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mangix
Any cool projects to try out? I remember there was one to replace coreutils.

~~~
jabirali
I am a daily user of fd (find), rg (grep), exa (ls), bat (cat), and am
planning to try out sd (sed).

These tools are in my opinion significantly better than the classical UNIX
tools: they can be orders of magnitude faster, understand .gitignore, have
more intuitive command-line options, and make better use of colors.

