Rust Programming Language Reaches 1.0 Alpha

c0d3g33k writes: Rust, a new a systems programming language with a focus on safety, performance and concurrency, has released the 1.0 alpha version of the language. This means that the language and core libraries are feature-complete for the 1.0 release. In practical terms, this means that the rate of change experienced by early adopters will slow down dramatically and major breaking changes should be very rare (during the alpha cycle some major changes may still occur if considered necessary). The language will stabilize further when the beta stage is reached (planned for six weeks from now).

Comments

Re:Rust is pointless because has a garbage collect

[c0d3g33k]

From your link:

1.8 No constructors

Functions can serve the same purpose as constructors without adding any language complexity.

How many good OO language exist without constructors? Maybe only javascript. This seems like a terrible decision.

Or maybe an informed one. Go and Rust -- objects without class

Besides, Rust isn't an "OO" language. It's a multi-paradigm language that supports pure-functional, concurrent-actor, imperative-procedural, and object-oriented styles. After 40+ years, a growing opinion seems to be that pure OOP isn't without its problems, and other approaches may fit development goals better. I'm not sure multi-paradigm languages are the answer (there seems to be a huge potential to be confusing, IMHO), but OOP isn't the evolutionary pinnacle of language design that the last few decades of hype would have us believe. I'm willing to give this approach a chance (and I'm always up for learning something new).

Critcisim of the OOP paradigm

(Aside: Not quite sure why, but the use of the term "paradigm" multiple times makes me feel slightly icky for some reason. Probably due to it's misuse in business jargon.)

Re:Rust is pointless because has a garbage collect

[TheRaven64]

Objective-C and Smalltalk also don't have constructors in the language, they merely have them as conventions in the standard libraries, which are adopted by most third-party code. There's no reason for constructors to be special, they're just methods that initialise the object and return a pointer / reference to it, and which (by API contract) may have undefined behaviour if used on an already initialised object.