Comment on Rust is Eating JavaScript

• solrize@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I had the impression Rust doesn’t handle concurrency particularly well, at least no better than Python, which does it badly (i.e. with colored functions). Golang, Erlang/Elixir, and GHC (Haskell) are way better in that regard, though they each have their own issues. I had believed for a while that Purescript targeting the Erlang VM and with all the JS tooling extirpated might be the answer, but that was just a pipe dream and I don’t know if it was really workable.

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  • Solemarc@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Rust makes multi threading very easy you can just use

    thread::spawn();
    

    But rust makes Async difficult because it’s naturally stackless so you need to create your own scheduler or use someone else’s like Tokio. Also, people have a bad habit of conflating async with concurrency which makes it more confusing.

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    • solrize@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Sure you can spawn threads but now you have all the hazards of shared memory and locks, giving the 2.0 version of aliasing errors and use-after-free bugs. Also, those are POSIX threads, which are quite heavyweight compared to the in-process multitasking of Golang etc. So I would say that’s not really an answer.

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      • artificialfish@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Go routines are certainly special and hard to match, but rust has all the normal abstractions of a language like C, just with a borrow checker so you can avoid memory leaks, write after read, etc.

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      • bamboo@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        What exactly are the hazards of shared memory and locks? The ownership system and the borrow checker do a pretty good job at enforcing correct usage, and if you are clever you can even guarantee no deadlocks (talk at rustconf 2024 about the fuchsia network stack).

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  • jimmux@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Purescript targeting the Erlang VM

    Have you tried Gleam?

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    • solrize@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      No I haven’t, I’ll take a look at it, though I felt suspicious of “task.async” as shown on the front page of gleam.run.

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  • artificialfish@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I don’t know but I don’t think rust has that problem. In fact I’ve always thought its data ownership paradigm is literally the most optimal approach to concurrency and parallelism. I really love using rayon in rust for instance.

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    • solrize@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      True, but of course it’s always a trade-off. At a certain point I have to defer to your judgment, at least until I’ve written some Rust code. But I’ve written a fair amount of C++ and a little bit of Ada and don’t find them all that convenient compared to Python or Haskell or whatever. We’ll see. ;)

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      • artificialfish@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        IME a language is as good as its package manager and libraries, and cargo is great.

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