Conversation

Yo Eight
@yoeight
If funny people keep saying #rustlang is a system PL. I do everything with Rust except system programming. I find Rust pretty decent as a general-purpose PL actually.
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Yo Eight
@yoeight
Now, I tend to dislike the fact that too many libraries and tools require you to use the rustc nightly version.
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p h z
@phaazon_
It is a system PL as it was designed to be. But it’s a damn good system PL with most abstractions, as you might have guessed and already known, coming from Haskell. So yeah, we can use it as a general PL (and we do). :)
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@phaazon_
As for the nightly compilers, I keep most of public-oriented crates on stable but I have a few of them that requires several nightly compilers. As features get stabilized, they’ll eventually end up in stable. :)
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deech
@deech
What's good about Rust as a general purpose PL compared to something like Nim? I've done non-trivial things in Rust and I felt like I was taking on a lot of complexity and losing a ton of abstraction for most my problems to benefit a small % of them.
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Brendan Zabarauskas
@brendanzab
Tooling, ecosystem, stability. Also some people prefer the more ML-style type system (over Nim). In comparison to FP langs, it provides a smooth transition to low level performance tuning.
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Brendan Zabarauskas
@brendanzab
I think there's lots to do with where you want to spend your 'annoyance points' too. I do feel sad about losing lots of abstraction, but have tried and failed with OPAM, stack, cabal, nix many times before.
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deech
@deech
Again, this is about using it for general purpose computing where perf and memory req's aren't as stringent. And also, FWIW nimble the nim package manager works ok, though not as nice as Cargo.
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Brendan Zabarauskas
@brendanzab
Good to hear! Yeah, I've used D before (in a similar space to Nim), but personally value a safe ML-style type system with no null more than what those langs provide in general purpose programming. Would prefer OCaml/Reason or Haskell here.
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