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Rust 1.6 Released (rust-lang.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The Rust team has announced the release of version 1.6 of their programming language. The biggest new feature is that libcore — the Rust core library — is now stable. "Rust's standard library is two-tiered: there's a small core library, libcore, and the full standard library, libstd, that builds on top of it. libcore is completely platform agnostic, and requires only a handful of external symbols to be defined. Rust's libstd builds on top of libcore, adding support for memory allocation, I/O, and concurrency. Applications using Rust in the embedded space, as well as those writing operating systems, often eschew libstd, using only libcore." Other features worth noting: Crates.io disallows wildcards for dependencies, there are a ton of stabilized APIs, timer functions that use milliseconds have been deprecated, and the parser will warn you if a failure was caused by Unicode characters that look similar but are interpreted differently.
They have to introduce a new version every now and then because they run out of people to recommend Rust to. A new version allows them to recommend it to themselves in times of scarcity.
We could call it CRust.
The Rust team has announced a new language, called Frick. This new language will build upon the lessons learned from Rust and provide the ability for developers to leverage security, the Cloud, and the IoT. Your knowledge of Rust is now obsolete and support for Rust has been dropped.
Since when is stability a feature? Isn't stability a basic requirement for software, especially in a programming language?
If it takes up to release 1.6 for things to become stable, I'm probably not interested.
The Rust home page makes it sound like Rust is some sort of a panacea. It leads one to believe that they'll get the power of C++, but with greater "safety".
But the more I look into Rust, the more uneasy I start to feel.
Despite all of the claims about how Rust is safer and leads to better code, the Rust compiler and standard library, both of which are implemented in Rust, are full of bugs! Don't forget that this is Rust code written by people who ought to know Rust better than anyone else; they designed the language after all! If they can't write non-buggy Rust code, then we shouldn't expect less-talented Rust users to be able to do any better.
It's also a big problem that there's only one implementation. If you run into a bug with it, and they don't fix it promptly, then you're likely fucked. At least with C++ there are multiple high quality implementations from different vendors. You can use GCC and Clang on most platforms. Then there are other systems like Intel C++, MSVC++, and so forth. You aren't left at the mercy of a single implementation when you use C++.
The syntax of Rust is unremarkable. It's like a bad version of C++ in many ways. Its resource management approach is also inflexible and impractical, despite the claims that it's one of Rust's most significant benefits. You're typically better off using modern C++ techniques. You'll get just about the same amount of safety, but with much fewer headaches. Even C++'s standard library, which is not known for being very good, is often better than Rust's.
It took them forever to get Rust 1.0 released. They were constantly changing their mind about anything and everything. While some evolution of a programming language is to be expected, all we saw from them was spastic thrashing about. It got so bad that you couldn't write code on a Monday and reliably have it compile by the following Friday! The fact that it took libcore up until release 1.6 to "stabilize" just goes to show how bad things were. The supposed "stable" release was full of non-stable interfaces!
The Rust community gives me a particularly bad feeling. They're rather tyrannical about enforcing their code of conduct. They even have a moderation attack squad to go after anyone they deem to be an enemy! I've never seen this kind of orchestrated control exerted over the community of any other programming language. This sets off warning alarms for me.
There's no reason to use Rust, in my opinion. You're better off with C++, or D, or Java, or Scala, or C#, or Go, or Swift, or one of the many other non-Rust languages out there. The language isn't very good, the standard libraries aren't very good, there's only one implementation, and the attitude of the community is downright frightening. I think you're better off not using Rust.
Time to start evangelizing Rust again.
We need to update Murphy's Laws for the new millennium:
* "Those that don't understand C are condemned to re-invent it, poorly."
Almost applies to every C derivative: C++, Rust, Obj-C, etc. /me ducks :-)
With apologies to Henry Spencer's "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
Because women aren't stupid enough to work for a corporate controlled language for free.
There, I said what we're all thinking.
females don't want to work for free :)
We need to update...
Why? C was never good enough to warrant such profundity, which is why no one has tried before you.
Tell me about it. You're mother's taking all my money!
No, what you're looking for is
Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Henry Spencer, in Introducing Regular Expressions (2012) by Michael Fitzgerald
Well, I'm not so sure I agree with that. Here's my take. I've taken a recent interest in Rust and Go. I've done C programming on and off for about 20 years along with quite a few other languages. I think C++ is just a big screw-up, and I appreciate what Rust is trying to accomplish. But, I don't think Rust is ready for prime-time yet and the development process seems really slow. I like the ideas they are coming up with. I think the trouble with it is that it doesn't seem to have a strong enough backing and I'm afraid it'll just fall into abandonware. I hope that's not the case.
Go takes a different approach from Rust, but I also like the direction it has taken. What Go has going for it is that it has strong backing. Of course, Google has the habit of dropping things too, so there's that...
Both of these languages I think are an improvement over C/C++. Of course everybody has their own opinions, but I'm right ;)
The biggest issue I have with Rust is the set of external libraries that you need to install with the Cargo tool. It isn't as much that we have the tool to install only the libraries you need, but going in the list of libraries. That are suppose to be in the approved repository, there are a lot of them with descriptions that makes me worry about using them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In what ways is this programming language relevant again? My memory is a little rusty.
How idiotic a statement is that?
Yes, let's write ALL of our software in C. Let's see productivity go through the roof, and lack of exploits with it.
I agree wholeheartedly with your comments for reinventions of C. However, I believe rust is going to be the surprise language of the decade. First, the fact that rust is changing does not bother me. It is a new language, after all. I just think they used the word "stable" too early. I am about 1/2 way through the rust book. I've had to learn some very new (to me) concepts but I would expect that from a language that claims genuinely new capabilites, and I now see how the promises of no segfaults and easy concurrent programming can actually be obtained. As for the community standards, some anonymous person above linked to the rust moderation team, calling them an attack squad. If you browse through their questions/answers area you will see an absense of strife. The questions are all answered in a very friendly manner. This will be a very interesting language to watch.
...yet another herd of kids reinvents Lisp.
Poorly.
Those that do understand C are in a race to extinction with the white rhino...
About habits of dropping things: I still do think its very bad that mozilla dropped its XUL framework. Probably windows users won't notice as their computers are turned into tablets with a mouse, but still I would appreciate if I had some xml based way to create native-like UI, and not the usual "web" stuff.
So I hope that rust won't meet a similar fate.
I just think they used the word "stable" too early.
Rust really changed heavily until May 2015 when 1.0 was released, so googling for common questions is very hard, as you get presented with largely outdated answers. So its really good they stabilized it, whatever now "stable" means. But the release 1.0 (or 1.6 or whatever) compiler only compiles stable interfaces. This way, 100% of your code can be compiled with stable rust.
Although Unix was not originally written in C (I had to look this up), it was re-written and ported using C fairly early. Arguably, Spencer's aphorism is as much about C as Unix. I think we can regard C-like languages and *NIX operating systems as "brothers".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
After reading these comments, I've decided to start learning Rust.
If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's the following: If Slashdot readers hate something, then it's The Next Big Thing.
You don't need to release rust, it's just a chemical reaction.
Interesting the difference in sentiment here vs HN for the same story for rust 1.6
considering she is dead, i can only assume you are a necrophiliac :)
I *never* said let's REwrite ALL our software. *That* would be stupid.
Can any of the C derivates be used for writing software? Sure, any bad language can be.
I was just pointing out the dumb re-designs.