We always hear how great Rust is, but I’d be curious to know where it isn’t.
In any project that’s sufficiently advanced and written in any other language. You don’t simply do a rewrite of 100k+ LOC just because you want to use Rust.
Somewhere where you’d rather use a scripting language like Python. I.e., rapid prototyping or gluing together some infra components.
A situation where your team’s expertise is in some other language.
A situation where a library/framework is native/only available for a certain language.
Few of these are strictly technical requirements. It’s obvious that you can use almost any language to do almost anything, including Rust, if that’s what you prefer. However, the context matters in the real world.
All this being said, I wish I had a chance to write Rust professionally. It’s a neat language.
Rust isn’t as rapid as other options, has less library support, and porting existing code is relatively difficult.
IMO because of the workarounds you need to do to handle the memory safety, you end up with a lot more hard to solve bugs than you do with conventional languages. It should be noted however that the bugs don’t end up being security vulnerabilities like they do in conventional systems.
If you have something that needs to be structurally sound and/or you have enough talented people willing to work on it, it’s a great option. If it needs to be fast and cheap and you don’t have a gaggle of rust developers on hand and it’s already written in another language, it might not be the best solution.
@rumba@Croquette They’re is a lot of people scrambling to rewrite existing c projects in rust for what?
for example ffmpegs rust rewrite is slower than the c version we need more maintainers rather than creating new rust alternatives that have no purpose
@rumba making new projects in rust sure cool but when big projects that most of the world relies on etc ffmpeg crucially need maintainers and contributions rust isnt needed and is a waste of resources when C can do it better, faster and easier rust is a fast fade that will likely remain in the shadow of C. Tbh your glazing rust without looking at both sides of the argument so the picture op posted really is true
Never used Rust but I’d like to point out the YouTube channel Low Level which covers security vulnerabilities (CVEs). He ends each video with “would Rust have fixed this?” and it’s pretty interesting.
According to him, when writing embedded software in Rust (and UEFI is embedded), you have to use Rust in unsafe mode which basically disables all the memory safety features. So in that kind of environment Rust isn’t really better than C, at least when it comes to memory safety.
That’s not to say Rust isn’t still a good option. It probably is.
Again, I never used Rust so I’m just parroting stuff I’ve heard, take all of this with a grain of salt.
Thanks for this. I was paraphrasing (badly, it seems). The video actually says it better:
To write code that lives in an embedded environment, it has to run in this mode in Rust called “no standard” (#![no_std]) and this mode called “no main” (#![no_main]). Basically you have no access to any of the core utilities in Rust, you have to write a lot of them yourself.
He then explains how embedded code necessarily has global mutability which is “the antithesis” of Rust development.
So yeah, you could make all of those wrappers, but at the end of the day you’ll end up with about the same amount of “unsafe” code as you would making the same thing in C++.
Edit: but if what you said still applies, it does seem like Rust would watch your back somewhat better than C++ would in that it wouldn’t even compile unsafe operations outside of unsafe blocks, unlike C++ to the best of my knowledge where you kind of have to review the code yourself to make sure it only uses the appropriate wrappers.
I am glad for your comment because I work with mcus and embedded solutions in C, so Rust, in that case, wouldn’t be neccesarily safer than C.
I will have to look into it. I need to do 30h of training every two years, so I will learn Rust regardless, but I was thinking about eventually switching to Rust for embedded projects. Might just keep Rust as my scripting language because it is easier for me than Python
It’s an interesting discussion. As someone who doesn’t actually deal with this and who literally never used Rust, I feel out of me depth. But it does sound like Rust has much better mechanisms to catch a programmer’s mistake. See my reply to the other guy.
Where would you say Rust isn’t the right solution?
We always hear how great Rust is, but I’d be curious to know where it isn’t.
In any project that’s sufficiently advanced and written in any other language. You don’t simply do a rewrite of 100k+ LOC just because you want to use Rust.
Somewhere where you’d rather use a scripting language like Python. I.e., rapid prototyping or gluing together some infra components.
A situation where your team’s expertise is in some other language.
A situation where a library/framework is native/only available for a certain language.
Few of these are strictly technical requirements. It’s obvious that you can use almost any language to do almost anything, including Rust, if that’s what you prefer. However, the context matters in the real world.
All this being said, I wish I had a chance to write Rust professionally. It’s a neat language.
Lots of your point apply to any language it seems. I should have specified new projects I guess.
But the points you’ve made are good nonetheless
@tyo_ukko @Croquette heavy on point 1
Rust provides safety and protection.
Rust isn’t as rapid as other options, has less library support, and porting existing code is relatively difficult.
IMO because of the workarounds you need to do to handle the memory safety, you end up with a lot more hard to solve bugs than you do with conventional languages. It should be noted however that the bugs don’t end up being security vulnerabilities like they do in conventional systems.
If you have something that needs to be structurally sound and/or you have enough talented people willing to work on it, it’s a great option. If it needs to be fast and cheap and you don’t have a gaggle of rust developers on hand and it’s already written in another language, it might not be the best solution.
I come from embedded C, so what you describe doesn’t feel alien to me (minus the security vulnerabilities haha)
I much prefer working with Rust restrictions than a higher level language without hard types because I am used to it.
Do you think Zig can be a complement to Rust in cases where the language cannot solve problems?
@rumba @Croquette They’re is a lot of people scrambling to rewrite existing c projects in rust for what?
for example ffmpegs rust rewrite is slower than the c version we need more maintainers rather than creating new rust alternatives that have no purpose
If you want to ignore re-making things out of memory-safe technology as an advancement, we don’t really have anything to talk about here.
@rumba making new projects in rust sure cool but when big projects that most of the world relies on etc ffmpeg crucially need maintainers and contributions rust isnt needed and is a waste of resources when C can do it better, faster and easier rust is a fast fade that will likely remain in the shadow of C. Tbh your glazing rust without looking at both sides of the argument so the picture op posted really is true
Ahem…
If you want to ignore re-making things out of memory-safe technology as an advancement, we don’t really have anything to talk about here.
I know Rust superficially. I use it to create simple tests for my embedded projects, so mostly just serial terminal with keyboard inputs.
It works a lot better for me than python because Rust is a lot closer to C than python.
So I cannot comment on Rust shortcomings. I was interested in knowing for what kind of projects Rust wasn’t good.
Never used Rust but I’d like to point out the YouTube channel Low Level which covers security vulnerabilities (CVEs). He ends each video with “would Rust have fixed this?” and it’s pretty interesting.
A very recent one is this: https://youtu.be/BTjj1ILCwRs?t=10m (timestamped to the relevant section)
According to him, when writing embedded software in Rust (and UEFI is embedded), you have to use Rust in unsafe mode which basically disables all the memory safety features. So in that kind of environment Rust isn’t really better than C, at least when it comes to memory safety.
That’s not to say Rust isn’t still a good option. It probably is.
Again, I never used Rust so I’m just parroting stuff I’ve heard, take all of this with a grain of salt.
Rust doesn’t have “safe” and “unsafe” modes in the sense your comment alludes to.
You can just do the little unsafe thing in a function that guarantees its safety, and then the rest of the code is safe.
For example, using C functions from rust is unsafe, but most of the time a simple wrapper can be made safe.
Example C function:
int arraysum(const int *array, int length) { int sum = 0; while (length > 0) { sum += *array; array++; length--; } }In rust, you can call that function safely by just wrapping it with a function that makes sure that
lengthis always the size ofarray. Such as:fn rust_arraysum(array: Vec<i32>) -> i32 { unsafe{ arraysum(array.as_ptr(), array.len() as i32)} }Even though
unsafeis used, it is perfectly safe to do so. And now we can callrust_arraysumwithout entering “unsafe mode”You could do similar wrappers if you want to write your embedded code. Where only a fraction of the code is potentially unsafe.
And even in unsafe blocks, you don’t disable all of the rust checks.
Thanks for this. I was paraphrasing (badly, it seems). The video actually says it better:
He then explains how embedded code necessarily has global mutability which is “the antithesis” of Rust development.
So yeah, you could make all of those wrappers, but at the end of the day you’ll end up with about the same amount of “unsafe” code as you would making the same thing in C++.
Edit: but if what you said still applies, it does seem like Rust would watch your back somewhat better than C++ would in that it wouldn’t even compile unsafe operations outside of
unsafeblocks, unlike C++ to the best of my knowledge where you kind of have to review the code yourself to make sure it only uses the appropriate wrappers.I am glad for your comment because I work with mcus and embedded solutions in C, so Rust, in that case, wouldn’t be neccesarily safer than C.
I will have to look into it. I need to do 30h of training every two years, so I will learn Rust regardless, but I was thinking about eventually switching to Rust for embedded projects. Might just keep Rust as my scripting language because it is easier for me than Python
It’s an interesting discussion. As someone who doesn’t actually deal with this and who literally never used Rust, I feel out of me depth. But it does sound like Rust has much better mechanisms to catch a programmer’s mistake. See my reply to the other guy.
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