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

Give the ecosystem a few days to catch up

[drewm19801927]

Now is a good time to play around with Rust and explore the language features! If you build against the beta release and don't add external package dependencies, your code will most likely continue to function for the duration of the 1.0 release cycle. However, now is probably a particularly ~bad time for new rust users to start a project and add a bunch of dependencies from Cargo/crates.io. Beta changed code dependencies on unstable features from warnings to errors, so a lot of common libraries in the ecosystem are broken at the moment, and will take a little while to get updated. Happy hacking!

Ada

[Elledan]

Is there any reason why anyone would want to use Rust when they're already proficient in both C++ and Ada?

You'd think that Ada is already covering most if not everything what Rust is trying to cover here, especially the memory safety and concurrency aspects.

Re:Ada

[Celarent Darii]

No. Ada already has a very basic syntax, which if you look at the Ada example is so much like Rust that really I fail to see any significant difference. Ada is also completely buzz-word compliant. It has also been used to make real projects, and even has a ANSI Standard since 1983. Rust can't even guarantee a feature set, nor even a stable keyword set.

Wish them luck, but frankly it's a bit like reinventing the wheel. I guess it's what hipsters do when they skip CS 102 in order to 'find themselves' - try to 'reinvent' what they should have learned in college.

Re:Ada

[Electricity Likes Me]

Complaining about other people's open source projects seems to be what Slashdot posters do in order to make themselves feel important.

Re:Ada

[tgv]

Yes, but you'll need 5 to 10 years of Rust experience. In a lead role.

Why do we need new langs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is written in JavaScript or soon will be. New language development is a waste of time that should be better spent making mobile apps for 3D printers.

Re:"without garbage collection"

[BasilBrush]

You must be a Java programmer. Garbage collection is generally a very bad idea for a systems language, because of the periodic stalls whilst it does the cleanup. Especially if it's shunting blocks around memory to defragment. It's one of the big reasons why Android underperforms iOS, why it's never been so smooth in operation. And the only thing a developer can do about it is switch to a different language or develop for a more powerful machine.

Memory fragmentation can be a problem - but the success of C and C++ in most domains over the decades has shown it's just one more aspect a programmer has to deal with, it's not a showstopper. It's fixable, on the same machine, with the same language.

Re:"without garbage collection"

[IamTheRealMike]

You must be a Java programmer. Garbage collection is generally a very bad idea for a systems language, because of the periodic stalls whilst it does the cleanup

Ah yes, the "systems language" debate. Oh how I love those.

Here are a few things to ponder.

The first is that your claim about Android underperforming iOS doesn't seem to have any merit. I have a Lollipop device here and it's as smooth as any iPhone I've ever used. Indeed I suspect by "smooth" you mean whether animations consistently hit 60fps and that has relatively little to do with garbage collection because most animations only last for a second or two, and you can easily delay GC until after it's finished. If you actually read about Project Butter and the work the Android team did to make things fast and smooth, it mostly involved deep changes to the graphics stack. The new GC in ART helps when doing things like scrolling down infinite lists, but otherwise, it's not a big deal. Bear in mind GC pauses on a modern Android device are in the realm of milliseconds - not fast enough to cause a frame skip unless you're really pushing up against the deadlines.

Another thing to consider is that people love to try and define "systems language" to mean whatever language they happen to prefer at the time. For instance the Linux guys have claimed for years that C++ isn't a "systems language" because you can't use it to write a kernel. However, quite a few successful kernels have done just that: for instance parts of the MacOS kernel are written in C++, the osV kernel is mostly C++ and so on. Microsoft even wrote an entire OS with kernel and everything in garbage collected C#. I've come to believe that the term "systems language" is so vague as to be useless for describing programming languages.

Final point. Rust claims to be superior for systems programming because it doesn't need a garbage collector. However, Mozilla is not in the business of writing kernels. They are in the business of writing web browsers. Web browsers absolutely can be garbage collected and due to the need to support Javascript, often are. At a time when Mozilla is dumping resources into designing an entirely new programming language and experimental layout engine that uses it (Servo), the Chrome guys are quietly getting on with migrating Blink (aka WebKit) to garbage collected C++. The project is called Oilpan, look it up. Apparently Google disagrees with Mozilla about the need for a non-GCd "systems language" for the kind of work they're doing.