Addendum to previous post:
Yes, I have heard of Rust, but have not yet made any serious attempt to understand it. I welcome experienced opinions on why it is great (beyond a superior memory management model). Even better is experience of using it cross-platform and from Python…
OK, so I was persuaded enough to spend a couple of hours last night speed-running the Rust book and have decided that it steals enough concepts from God’s One True Language* for me to be interested. I also suspect that re-learning modern C++ will take me way longer…
* Haskell
#askfedi #programmingLanguages #cplusplus #rustlang #Haskell
Important announcement!
I have written some rust code and I don't immediately hate it. I have not, however, had to fight the borrow checker yet…
I am making things easy for myself on this Rust journey by focusing on only using the most basic stuff
You know, like modules, workspaces, generics, interior mutability, declarative and procedural macros…
Finding that a lot of really useful Rust features are very thinly documented. `Arc::make_mut()` is an *incredibly* powerful feature that is barely discussed. I only discovered it as a passing mention in the `Cow` docs. Just this one method has shaved literally hundreds of lines off the code I'm writing…
Worse still, the `Arc` introductory notes actually go out of their way to warn that you can't obtain a mutable reference, and point users at `Mutex`, without mentioning this copy-on-write feature!
#rustlang
@jonathanhogg Absolutely not comparable `Arc<Mutex<>>` gives shared access to mutable content, `Arc::make_mut()` is clone-on-write, so you mutate ONLY the copy, changes not reflected anywhere else; all `Weak` pointers are invalidated.
@michalfita you’ll find that I didn’t say they were comparable, just that the latter is thinly documented. Copy-on-write was exactly the behaviour I needed and a Mutex was how I was hacking it first time round
@jonathanhogg OK, fine then.
Nice you discovered something you like in #Rust.
And `Mutex` is a phenomenal ball-ache. Trying to push simple iterators through `Ref` nodes consumed most of the hundreds of lines of code I just deleted…
#rustlang
