Curious: if you've built something with Rust, what was it, and why did you use Rust?
(This isn't a prelude to snark, I just started reading the Rust book last night and going down the rabbit hole 🦀)
Conversation
Currently programming languages. It's the thing I know the best. It's great to have a reasonably expressive type system having my back. Also has a nice package manager, tooling, etc. The low level control over memory when I need it is nice, without compromising on memory safety.
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I can also tell you what I find annoying about it if you like?
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I usually use annoying programming languages :)
What are your rust gripes?
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Smart pointers are great, but also annoying. Can be hard to pattern match through, for example, also makes it more clunky to construct and deconstruct tree structures.
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On the whole rust code is a bit more verbose than what you'd get in OCaml or Haskell, and the syntax can be a bit clunky. I wish you could track effects better.
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It does sometimes force you to think about lower level details, which can be good, but sometimes can get in the way of prototyping, depending on what domain you are working in.
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I often wish for an ML-style module system over traits, but, not many languages have those. Traits are still nice, just have their limitations.
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I've seen 'ML' referenced in PL contexts before and assumed it was ML/AI related...this tweet made it click that ML is different in this context 😅
Just started reading up on it
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Yeah! ML is coool. It's an incredibly influential language that has infused the design of Haskell, Scala, Swift, OCaml, Rust, Elm, and many others. It's a bit of a sore point that machine learning took over ‘ML’, but I guess that's how goes (a bit like how cryptographers get sad)
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You can also find a bit more of the history behind ML in “The History of Standard ML”:
‘ML’ here stands for ‘Meta Language’ – it was given that name because the language was originally intended to be used to implement a theorem prover (LCF) and be used as a scripting language to extend the prover. It's completely unrelated to ‘Machine Learning’.