Rust 1.0 Enters Beta

An anonymous reader writes: Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety and speed and aims, among other things, to offer memory safety without garbage collection and threads without data races. Over on the Rust blog, the Rust Core Team has announced the release of Rust 1.0 beta. They write, 'The beta release marks a very significant "state transition" in the move towards 1.0. In particular, with the beta release, all libraries and language features that are planned to be stable for 1.0 have been marked as stable. As such, the beta release represents an accurate preview of what Rust 1.0 will include.' The final Rust 1.0 release is scheduled for May 15th, 2015. A warning from the developers: "Rust is a work-in-progress and may do anything it likes up to and including eating your laundry." The FAQ is worth reading.

Comments

Have you actually tried using Rust?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you actually tried using Rust? I have, and I can tell you that it isn't "polished".

Maybe it won't change as goddamn much as it typically has each day, but it's not a clean language like say Python or C# are.

Its library API is something awful. You have to write stuff like:

let path = Path::new(&app_path)
println!("file name: {}", path.file_name().unwrap().to_str().unwrap());

The memory management approach is also, to put it nicely, a royal pain in the ass to use. Maybe it can guarantee a higher level of safety, but it slows down development to a crawl, even once you understand how it all works and can work with the compiler instead of against it.

Its string handling is fucked up beyond belief. Go read about about String and &str if you don't believe me.

Rust is a very tedious and anal language to use, to the point of any safety gains being eliminated by much slower development time.

I feel that I can get almost the same level of safety by using modern C++ techniques like RAII and smart pointers, along with strict compiler options, without the speed of development slowing to a crawl.

Rust will be "polished" the day that we can use it swiftly and effectively, rather than being burdened by its awkward memory management, or its shit-for-brains library API, or it's convoluted string handling. I mean, these are some pretty basic things that it's screwing up. If it can't get those even remotely right, it's not "polished".

Re:Ada

[drewm19801927]

Wow, Ada code looks nothing like Rust code to me. Ada looks like a mix of BASIC and python. I don't know Ada, but Rust supposedly makes stronger guarantees of memory correctness for parallel code. Rust just went beta yesterday; breaking changes up to now were to be expected. Once there are more people with real-world experience with both Ada and Rust, I'll be very interested in reading about their experiences. Maybe you haven't been following it closely, but Rust is not some one-developer toy scripting language. A team of brilliant engineers has been working on it full-time at Mozilla for years.