This Week in Rust

[bjz_]

> 89 pull requests were merged this week. This is the most pull requests merged in a week, ever.

The activity of this community never ceases to amaze me. Contributions and improvements are coming in thick and fast, and yet still we still seem to be keeping on top of it. Only 54 PRs are currently open on Github, despite the churn.

[theknown99]

Reinventing the first 90% of the wheel is quick. It's that last 10% that takes all the time.

[gmjosack]

I've been learning Rust lately and people like cmr and the rest of the guys over at #rust have been super helpful. While Rust is moving fast the This Week in Rust posts make it very easy to keep up.

Overall I'm loving the language and the community and can't wait to see more wide adoption.

[sanderjd]

Their IRC room is the best I've lurked / asked questions in. They frequently discuss way-over-my-head language design proposals and even more frequently answer noob questions in a friendly and patient manner. It's a great community, and I hope it stays that way!

[moron4hire]

The progress being made on Rust is amazing. I'm not sure I've ever seen a language developed in such earnest before.

The tutorial on rust-lang.org is pretty good, but I find myself confused about the exact nature of the utility of some of the features. The Linked List example is certainly better than any old Foo/Bar/Baz one, but it's still pretty limited.

Are there any suggestions for existing Rust applications that can be read to get a better handle of how the language is intended to be used "in the wild"? It'd be great if there were, say, a CRUD website, or a user-options config GUI utility, something really basic that does stupidly simple work of a non-trivial nature. I feel like the added overhead of learning how compilers in general are supposed to be designed would make reading the Rust compiler source anti-productive.

[Codas]

The rust compiler itself would certainly not be the best resource, but I thing servo[1] would do just fine. Also, you can just look at some rust repositories[2] on github.

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/servo/

[2]: https://github.com/trending?l=rust

[vanderZwan]

That looks like quite a list of breaking changes (although I don't know how much real code is affected). I guess that's good in the sense of being willing to fix things.

Does the Rust community have a gofix-like tool to keep up with this?

[bjz_]

Well, the language is still pre-1.0. It is better to fix things now than be stuck with supporting poor design decisions years into the future. The good thing is that the semantic changes to the language have decreased significantly over the past year, and feature flags are now provided to force users to opt-in to experimental parts of the language. Much of the churn is is now on the library front.

There is no gofix tool, but you can use http://rust-ci.org/ to get immediate feedback when things break.

[dbaupp]

Nope; just the IRC channel, these newsletters and http://www.rust-ci.org/ to inform people when things break (it triggers Travis CI builds each day, when a new nightly package is built).

The language moves too fast for maintaining a gofix tool to be feasible or a productive use of time (IMO much better to spend all the effort on getting the language nicer and nicer as fast as possible).

[shadowmint]

Hmm... is the removal of std::to_bytes something that's been pending for a while?

The commit (https://github.com/mozilla/rust/commit/efaf4db24c92e119e26dc...) is recent and it breaks a bunch of libraries (eg rust-sdl2).

Feels like it deserves a mention.

[dbaupp]

That commit is "just" clean-up after https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/11863

But yeah, probably worth an explicit mention.

[erickt]

Yep, you are right. I just mailed rust-dev an announcement of the new Hash framework:

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2014-February/00...

[drbawb]

FYI I've got a pull request pending[0] that fixes the `rust-sdl2` breakage :)

[0]: https://github.com/AngryLawyer/rust-sdl2/pull/46

[kzrdude]

yes, to_bytes was just a feeder into the hashing system and it was known to need refactoring for a long time.

[ilaksh]

I am not associated with nimrod in any way, just an enthusiastic new user. Before I found out about nimrod I thought Rust was the best new language.

[bjz_]

Nimrod, like D, does great things in terms of metaprogramming and static code generation whilst providing a GC that abstracts away from memory management. Rust on the other hand thrusts memory management into the programmers face, excelling at providing safe, deterministic control over allocation and a relatively advanced type system compared to the incumbent systems programming languages. Nimrod and D seem like worthy alternatives to Go and C#, where as Rust is providing a much needed alternative to the venerable C and C++ languages that have dominated systems progamming for the last forty years.

It seems to me like a marketing failure that Nimrod and D seem to be attempting to go after the low level systems programming domains when they should really be competing at a higher level of abstraction.

[Ygg2]

What does this have to do with Rust?! Especially to the This week in Rust column?

[tejinderss]

How does nimrod compare to Julia?

[namelezz]

What kind of problems are Rust trying to address?