Rust programming language?

[ebola]

(not sure if this is the right subforum..)
So, serious graphics programming centres on C++ (plus shaders obviously);

Is anyone here interested in the potential of Rust? Its' shaping up really nicely IMO, although I can see why people have doubts.. C++ is a complex language to master, its understandable that (i)after such a personal investment people might not want to move away from it - and that (ii) people are skeptical that its feasible to replace the work on the language ecosystem.(IDE tools..)
But, rust leverages so much of that with an LLVM backend. Context Free Grammar & clean macros should lead to better tools in future.

In my case, I was unambiguously happy with the jump from ASM to C, but C++ has always been a double edge sword.. more that i like than dislike obviously- I have used it for years - but enough to I dislike that I went on a quest that ended up with me following the progress of Rust with great interest.
I have never really liked the whole mindset of classes.. I find them artificial. I prefer to seperate code & data. (Polymorphism itself, I like that.). I have never trusted garbage collection , so i looked on with envy at features in GC based languages - seemed a shame I had no choice until now.

the features I personally like.. the slightly more functional 'flavour' (even though its still multi-paradigm); aliasing rules (no need for 'restrict')stemming from its pointer-safety.. no header files - that might sound trivial but these really do annoy the hell out of me.
And having tasted enum/match I want to keep all that.. its' also pretty interesting they way generics & vtables are related through traits.

Some call it 'C meets haskell' but I think its more accurate to say its a 'cleaned up C++1y'

Its probably going to polarise.. I've heard people reject it out of hand because they dont like writing 'fn' or ":" before types, or they dont like "the random symbols".. but if safe pointers are supposed to be used predominantly, they deserve symbols rather than being bolt-ons IMO.

 

[Dominik D]

I tried Rust for several tiny experiments and as much as I wanted to love it, its type system was a dealbreaker fro me. It's powerful, yes, it's expressive, yes, it covers all the bases, yes. But it's insanely complex too.

http://cosmic.mearie.org/2014/01/periodic-table-of-rust-types/

 

[oeLangOetan]

I tried Rust for several tiny experiments and as much as I wanted to love it, its type system was a dealbreaker fro me. It's powerful, yes, it's expressive, yes, it covers all the bases, yes. But it's insanely complex too.

http://cosmic.mearie.org/2014/01/periodic-table-of-rust-types/

Most of this is just pretty syntax for unique_pointer and shared_pointer.
The rust typesystem is actually a lot simpler than C++.

 

[Rodéric]

Sounded interesting but I found http://chapel.cray.com is both easier to read/write and more powerful...
But YMMV.

 

[Dominik D]

Most of this is just pretty syntax for unique_pointer and shared_pointer.
The rust typesystem is actually a lot simpler than C++.

Which is precisely why I tend to write either in C or C# (depending on what I want to achieve).

 

[ebola]

"just" pretty syntax for unique_ptr ... but with extra compile time safety, and more solid concept of immutability... avoiding the need for restrict.

heh. well I guess its going to polarize people.

I'm really enjoying it - its' the liberation from C++ that I've been waiting for , i think.
perhaps its just something in my personality - impatience, intolerance for "dotting i's and crossing t's" .. header files just annoy the hell out of me.

could just be that after using C++ for *so* long something fresh is "refreshing".

 

[gwahorton]

I don't know enough about Rust to criticise it, but are actors its only tool for concurrency? Tim Sweeney, like language theorist Peter van Roy, seems to think transactional memory's also essential for games (and Intel's new Transactional Synchronization Extensions should finally make it fast). It might be handy to have dataflow programming via single-assignment variables or E-style vats too, to keep concurrency declarative where possible.

Sweeney, whose 2006 POPL presentation is still very interesting, coauthored a (hardcore type theory paper) last year, so it looks like he's still working on this stuff.

 

[gwahorton]

OK, so Rust does have dataflow programming via sync::Future.