Tag Archives: c++

2018/06/12
10 Comments
Programming

Myths programmers believe

I’m fascinated by misconceptions. I used to regularly host pub quizzes (aka trivia nights in some parts of our blue marble), and anyone who’s attended a few of my quizzes know that if it sounds like a trick question, it probably is. I’ve done more than a fair share of “True or False” rounds where the answer to all the questions was false but hardly anyone noticed the pattern because each and every single one of them were things that people believe but simply aren’t true. Wait, how does that relate to programming? Read on.

Programmers that comment on Hacker News or Proggit links are not a randomly sampled cross section of the industry. They’re better. As with anyone who’s ever attended a conference, they’re self selected individuals who are more passionate about their craft than the average bear. And yet, I see comments over and over again, from well-meaning savvy coders about beliefs and misconceptions that seem to be as widespread as they are provably false. Below are some of my favourites, with explanations as to what they mean.

C is magically fast.

I’ve written about this before. If anything on this list is going to get me downvoted, cause cognitive dissonance, and start flame wars, this will probably be the one.

As everything else in this blog post, I just… don’t understand. Maybe it’s because I learned C back when it was considered slow for games programming and only asm would do. Or maybe it’s that it all compiles down to machine code anyway, and I don’t harbour homeopathic-like tendencies to think that the asm, like water, has memory of whence it came, causing the CPU to execute it faster. Which brings me to…

GC languages are magically slow.

Where GC means “tracing GC”. If I had a penny for each time someone comments on a thread about how tracing GCs just aren’t acceptable when one does serious systems programming I’d have… a couple of pounds and/or dollars.

I kind of understand this one, given that I believed it myself until 4 years ago. I too thought that the magical pixies working in the background to clear up my mess “obviously” cause a program to run slower. I’ll do a blog post on this one specifically.

Emacs is a text-mode program.

Any time somebody argues that text editors can’t compete with IDEs, somebody invariably asks why they’d want to use a text-mode editor. I’m an Emacs user, and I don’t know why anyone would want to do that either. Similarly…

Text editors can’t and don’t have features like autocomplete, go to definition, …

This usually shows up in the same discussions where Emacs is a terminal program. It also usually comes up when someone says an IDE is needed because of the features above. I don’t program without them, I think it’d be crazy to. Then again, I’ve rarely seen anyone use their editor of choice well. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched someone open a file in vim, realise it’s not the one they want, close vim, open another file, close it again… aaarrrgh.

I’ve also worked with someone who “liked Eclipse”, but didn’t know “go to definition” was a thing. One wonders.

Given that the C ABI is the lingua franca of programming, the implementation should be written in C

C is the true glue language when it comes to binary. It got that way for historical reasons, but there’s no denying it reigns supreme in that respect. For reasons that dumbfound me, a lot of people take this to mean that if you have a C API, then obviously the only language you can implement it in is C. Never mind that the Visual Studio libc is written in C++, this is why you pick C!

C and C++ are the same language, and its real name is C/C++.

And nobody includes Objective C in there (which, unlike C++, is an actual superset of C), because… reasons? There are so many things that are common between the two of them that sometimes it makes sense to write C/C++ because whatever it is you’re saying applied to both of them. But that’s not how I see it used most of the time.

Rust is unique in its fearless concurrency.

I guess all the people writing Pony, D, Haskell, Erlang, etc. didn’t get the memo. Is it way safer than in C++? Of course it is, but that’s a pretty low bar to clear.

The first time I wrote anything in Rust it took me 30min to write a deadlock. Not what I call fearless. “Fearless absence of data races”? Not as catchy, I guess.

You can only write kernels in C

Apparently Haiku and Redox don’t exist. Or any number of unikernel frameworks.

The endianness of your platform matters.

This is another one that’s always confused me. I never even understood why `htons` and `ntohs` existed. There’s so much confusion over this, and I’ve failed so miserably at explaining it to other people, that I just point them to someone who’s explained it better than I can.

EDIT: I didn’t mean that endianness never matter, it’s just that 99.9% of the time people think it does, it doesn’t. I had to read up on IEEE floats once, but that doesn’t mean that in the normal course of programming I need to know which bits are the mantissa.

If your Haskell code compiles, it works!

Err… no. Just… no.

Simple languages get rid of complexity.

Also known as the “sweep the dust under the rug” fallacy.

EDIT: I apparently wasn’t clear about this. I mean that the inherent complexity of the task at hand doesn’t go away and might even be harder to solve with a simple language. There are many joke languages that are extremely simple but that would be a nightmare to code anything in.

Line coverage is a measure of test quality.

I think measuring coverage is important. I think looking at pretty HTML coverage reports helps to write better software. I’m confident that chasing line coverage targets is harmful and pointless. Here’s a silly function:

int divide(int x, int y) { return x + y }

Here’s the test suite:

TEST(divide) { divide(4, 2); }

100% test coverage. The function doesn’t even return the right answers to anything. Oops. Ok, ok, so we make sure we actually assert on something:

TEST(divide) { 
    assert(divide(4, 2) == 2); 
    assert(divide(6, 3) == 2);
}

int divide(int x, int y) { return 2; }

100% test coverage. Hmm…

TEST(divide) { 
    assert(divide(4, 2) == 2); 
    assert(divide(9, 3) == 3);
}

int divide(int x, int y) { return x / y; }

Success! Unless, of course, you pass in 0 for y…

Measure test coverage. Look at the reports. Make informed decisions on what to do next. I’ve also written about this before.

C maps closely to hardware.

If “hardware” means a PDP11 or a tiny embedded device, sure. There’s a reason you can’t write a kernel in pure C with no asm. And then there’s all of this: SIMD, multiple CPU cores, cache hiearchies, cache lines, memory prefetching, out-of-order execution, etc. At least it has atomics now.

I wonder if people will still say C maps closely to hardware when they’re writing code for quantum computers. It sounds silly, but I’ve heard worse.

Also, Lisp machines never existed and FPGAs/GPUs aren’t hardware (remember Poe’s law).

No other language can do X

No matter what your particular X is, Lisp probably can.

 

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Tagged , ,
2018/04/09
7 Comments
Programming

#include C headers in D code

I’ll lead with a file:

// stdlib.dpp
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

void main() {
    printf("Hello world\n".ptr);

    enum numInts = 4;
    auto ints = cast(int*) malloc(int.sizeof * numInts);
    scope(exit) free(ints);

    foreach(int i; 0 .. numInts) {
        ints[i] = i;
        printf("ints[%d]: %d ".ptr, i, ints[i]);
    }

    printf("\n".ptr);
}

The keen eye will notice that, except for the two include directives, the file is just plain D code. Let’s build and run it:

% d++ stdlib.dpp
% ./stdlib
Hello world
ints[0]: 0 ints[1]: 1 ints[2]: 2 ints[3]: 3

Wait, what just happened?

You just saw a D file directly #include two headers from the C standard library and call two functions from them, which was then compiled and run. And it worked!

Why? I mean, just… why?

I’ve argued before that #include is C++’s killer feature. Interfacing to existing C or C++ libraries is, for me, C++’s only remaining use case. You include the relevant headers, and off you go. No bindings, no nonsense, it just works. As a D fan, I envied that. So this is my attempt to eliminate that “last” (again, for me, reasonable people may disagree) use case where one would reach for C++ as the weapon of choice.

There’s a reason C++ became popular. Upgrading to it from C was a decision with essentially 0 risk.  I wanted that “just works” feature for D.

How?

d++ is a compiler wrapper. By default it uses dmd to compile the D code, but that’s configurable through the –compiler option. But dmd can’t compile code with #include directives in it (the lexer won’t even like it!), so what gives?

d++ will go through a .dpp file, and upon encountering an #include directive it expands it in-place, similarly to what would happen with a C or C++ compiler. Differently from clang or gcc however, the header file can’t just be inserted in, since the syntax of the declarations is in a different language. So it uses libclang to parse the header, and translates all of the declarations on the fly. This is trickier than it sounds since C and C++ allow for things that aren’t valid in D.

There’s one piece of the usability puzzle that’s missing from that story: the preprocessor. C header files have declarations but also macros, and some of those are necessary to use the library as it was intended. One can try and emulate this with CTFE functions in D, and sometimes it works. But I don’t want “sometimes”, I want guarantees, and the only way to do that is… to use the C preprocessor.

Blasphemy, I know. But since worse is better, d++ redefines all macros in the included header file so they’re available for use by the D program. It then runs the C preprocessor on the result of expanding all the #include directives, and the final result is a regular D file that can be compiled by dmd.

What next?

Bug fixing and C++ support. I won’t be happy until this works:

#include <vector>
void main() {
    auto v = std.vector!int();
    v.push_back(42);
}

Code or it didn’t happen

I almost forgot: https://github.com/atilaneves/dpp.

 

Tagged , ,
2017/11/20
1 Comment
Programming

On ESR’s thoughts on C and C++

ESR wrote two blog posts about moving on from C recently. As someone who has been advocating for never writing new code in C again unless absolutely necessary, I have my own thoughts on this. I have issues with several things that were stated in the follow-up post.

“C++ as the language to replace C. Which ain’t gonna happen” – except it has. C++ hasn’t completely replaced C, but no language ever will. There’s just too much of it out there. People will be maintaining C code 50 years from now no matter how many better alternatives exist. If even gcc switched to C++…

It’s true that you’re (usually) not supposed to use raw pointers in C++, and also true that you can’t stop another developer in the same project from doing so. I’m not entirely sure how C is better in that regard, given that _all_ developers will be using raw pointers, with everything that entails. And shouldn’t code review prevent the raw pointers from crashing the party?

“if you can mentally model the hardware it’s running on, you can easily see all the way down” – this used to be true, but no longer is. On a typical server/laptop/desktop (i.e. x86-64), the CPU that executes the instructions is far too complicated to model, and doesn’t even execute the actual assembly in your binary (xor rax, rax doesn’t xor anything, it just tells the CPU a register is free). C doesn’t have the concept of cache lines, which is essential for high performance computing and on any non-trivial CPU.

“One way we can tell that C++ is not sufficient is to imagine an alternate world in which it is. In that world, older C projects would routinely up-migrate to C++“. Like gcc?

“Major OS kernels would be written in C++“. I don’t know about “major”, but there’s  BeOS/Haiku and IncludeOS.

“Not only has C++ failed to present enough of a value proposition to keep language designers uninterested in imagining languages like D, Go, and Rust, it has failed to displace its own ancestor.” – I think the problem with this argument is the (for me) implicit assumption that if a language is good enough, “better enough” than C, then logically programmers will switch. Unfortunately, that’s not how humans behave, as as much as some of us would like to pretend otherwise, programmers are still human.

My opinion is that C++ is strictly better than C. I’ve met and worked with many bright people who disagree. There’s nothing that C++ can do to bring them in – they just don’t value the trade-offs that C++ makes/made. Some of them might be tempted by Rust, but my anedoctal experience is that those that tend to favour C over C++ end up liking Go a lot more. I can’t stand Go myself, but the things about Go that I don’t like don’t bother its many fans.

My opinion is also that D is strictly better than C++, and I never expect the former to replace the latter. I’m even more fuzzy on that one than the reason why anybody chooses to write C in a 2017 greenfield project.

My advice to everyone is to use whatever tool you can be most productive in. Our brains are all different, we all value completely different trade-offs, so use the tool that agrees with you. Just don’t expect the rest of the world to agree with you.

 

Tagged , , ,
2017/10/24
1 Comment
Programming

Operator overloading is a good thing (TM)

Brains are weird things. I used to be a private maths tutor, and I always found it amazing how a little change in notation could sometimes manage to completely confuse a student. Notation itself seems to me to be a major impediment for the majority of people to like or be good at maths. I had fun sometimes replacing the x in an equation with a drawing of an apple to try and get the point across that the actual name (or shape!) of a variable didn’t matter, that it was just standing in for something else.

Programmers are more often than not mathematically inclined, and yet a similar phenomenon seems to occur with the “shape” of certain functions, i.e. operators. For reasons that make us much sense to me as x confusing maths students, the fact that a function has a name that has non-alphanumeric characters in them make them particularly weird. So weird that programmers shouldn’t be allowed to defined functions with those names, only the language designers. That’s always a problem for me – languages that don’t give you the same power as the designers are Blub as far as I’m concerned. But every now and again I see a blost post touting the advantages of some language or other, listing the lack of operator overloading as a bonus.

I don’t even understand the common arguments against operator overloading. One is that somehow “a + b” is now confusing, because it’s not clear what the code does. How is that different from having to read the documentation/implementation of “a.add(b)”? If it’s C++ and “a + b” shows up, anyone who doesn’t read it as “a.operator+(b)” or “operator+(a, b)” with built-in implementations of operator+ for integers and floating point numbers needs to brush up on their C++. And then there’s the fact that that particular operator is overloaded anyway, even in C – the compiler emits different instructions for floats and integers, and its behaviour even depends on the signedness of ints.

Then there’s the complaint that one could make operator+ do something stupid like subtract. Because, you know, this is totally impossible:

int add(int i, int j) {
    return i - j;}

Some would say that operator overloading is limited in applicability since only numerical objects and matrices really need them. But used with care, it might just make sense:

auto path = "foo" / "bar" / "baz";

Or in the C++ ranges by Eric Niebler:

using namespace ranges;
int sum = accumulate(view::ints(1)
                   | view::transform([](int i){return i*i;})
                   | view::take(10), 0);

I’d say both of those previous examples are not only readable, but more readable due to use of operator overloading. As I’ve learned however, readability is in the eye of the beholder.

All in all, it confuses me when I hear/read that lacking operator overloading makes a language simpler. It’s just allowing functions to have “special” names and special syntax to call them (or in Haskell, not even that). Why would the names of functions make code so hard to read for some people? I guess you’d have to ask my old maths students.

Tagged , , , ,
2017/08/23
9 Comments
Programming

On the novelty factor of compile-time duck typing

Or structural type systems for the pendantic, but I think most people know what I mean when I say “compile-time duck typing”.

For one reason or another I’ve read quite a few blog posts about how great the Go programming language is recently. A common refrain is that Go’s interfaces are amazing because you don’t have to declare that a type has to satisfy an interface; it just does if its structure matches (hence structural typing). I’m not sold on how great this actually is – more on that later.

What I don’t understand is how this is presented as novel and never done before. I present to you a language from 1990:

template <typename T>
void fun(const T& animal) {
    cout << "It says: " << animal.say() << endl;
}

struct Dog {
    std::string say() const { return "woof"; }
};

struct Cat {
    std::string say() const { return "meow"; }
};

int main() {
    fun(Dog());
    fun(Cat());
}

Most people would recognise that as being C++. If you didn’t, well… it’s C++. I stayed away from post-C++11 on purpose (i.e. Dog{} instead of Dog()). Look ma, compile-time duck typing in the 1990s! Who’d’ve thunk it?

Is it nicer in Go? In my opinion, yes. Defining an interface and saying a function only takes objects that conform to that interface is a good thing, and a lot better than the situation in C++ (even with std::enable_if and std::void_t). But it’s easy enough to do that in D (template contraints), Haskell (typeclasses), and Rust (traits), to name the languages that do something similar that I’m more familiar with.

But in D and C++, there’s currently no way to state that your type satisfies what you need it to due to an algorithm function requiring it (such as having a member function called “say” in the silly example above) and get compiler errors telling you why it didn’t satisfy it (such as  mispelling “say” as “sey”). C++, at some point in the future, will get concepts exactly to alleviate this. In D, I wrote a library to do it. Traits and typeclasses are definitely better, but in my point of view it’s good to be able to state that a type does indeed “look like” what it needs to do to be used by certain functions. At least in D you can say static assert(isAnimal!MyType); – you just don’t know why that assertion fails when it does. I guess in C++17 one could do something similar using std::void_t. Is there an equivalent for Go? I hope a gopher enlightens me.

All in all I don’t get why this gets touted as something only Go has. It’s a similar story to “you can link statically”. I can do that in other languages as well. Even ones from the 90s.

Tagged , , ,
2017/08/15
5 Comments
Programming

The main function should be shunned

The main function (in languages that have it) is…. special. It’s the entry point of the program by convention, there can only be one of them in all the object files being linked, and you can’t run a program without it. And it’s inflexible.

Its presence means that the final output has to be an executable. It’s likely however, that the executable in question might have code that others might rather reuse than rewrite, but they won’t be able to use it in their own executables. There’s already a main function in there. Before clang nobody seemed to stumble on the idea that a compiler as a library would be a great idea. And yet…

This is why I’m now advocating for always putting the main function of an executable in its own file, all by itself. And also that it do the least amount of work possible for maximum flexibility. This way, any executable project is one excluded file away in the build system from being used as a library. This is how I’d start a, say, C++ executable project from scratch today:

#include "runtime.hpp"
#include <iostream>
#include <stdexcept>

int main(int argc, const char* argv[]) {
    try {
        run(argc, argv); // "real" main
        return 0;
    } catch(const std::exception& ex) {
        std::cout << "Oops: " << ex.what() << std::endl;
        return 1;
    }
}

In fact, I think I’ll go write an Emacs snippet for that right now.

Tagged ,
2016/07/18
16 Comments
Programming

C is not magically fast, part 2

I wrote a blog post before about how C is not magically fast, but the sentiment that C has properties lacking in other languages that make it so is still widespread. It was with no surprise at all then that a colleague mentioned something resembling that recently at lunch break, and I attempted to tell him why it wasn’t (at least always) true.

He asked for an example where C++ would be faster, and I resorted to the old sort classic: C++ sort is faster than C’s qsort because of templates and inlining. He then asked me if I’d ever measured it myself, and since I hadn’t, I did just that after lunch. I included D as well because, well, it’s my favourite language. Taking the minimum time after ten runs each to sort a random array of 10M simple structs on my laptop yielded the results below:

  • D: 1.147s
  • C++: 1.723s
  • C: 1.789s

I expected  C++ to be faster than C, I didn’t expect the difference to be so small. I expected D to be the same speed as C++, but for some reason it’s faster. I haven’t investigated the reason why for lack of interest, but maybe because of how strings are handled?

I used the same compiler backend for all 3 so that wouldn’t be an influence: LLVM. I also seeded all of them with the same number and used the same random number generator: the awful srand from C’s standard library. It’s terrible, but it’s the only easy way to do it in standard C and the same function is available from the other two languages. I also only timed the sort, not counting init code.

The code for all 3 implementations:

// sort.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/resource.h>

typedef struct {
    int i;
    char* s;
} Foo;

double get_time() {
    struct timeval t;
    struct timezone tzp;
    gettimeofday(&t, &tzp);
    return t.tv_sec + t.tv_usec*1e-6;
}

int comp(const void* lhs_, const void* rhs_) {
    const Foo *lhs = (const Foo*)lhs_;
    const Foo *rhs = (const Foo*)rhs_;
    if(lhs->i < rhs->i) return -1;
    if(lhs->i > rhs->i) return 1;
    return strcmp(lhs->s, rhs->s);
}

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
    if(argc < 2) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Must pass in number of elements\n");
        return 1;
    }

    srand(1337);
    const int size = atoi(argv[1]);
    Foo* foos = malloc(size * sizeof(Foo));
    for(int i = 0; i < size; ++i) {
        foos[i].i = rand() % size;
        foos[i].s = malloc(100);
        sprintf(foos[i].s, "foo%dfoo", foos[i].i);
    }

    const double start = get_time();
    qsort(foos, size, sizeof(Foo), comp);
    const double end = get_time();
    printf("Sort time: %lf\n", end - start);

    free(foos);
    return 0;
}


// sort.cpp
#include <iostream>
#include <algorithm>
#include <string>
#include <vector>
#include <chrono>
#include <cstring>

using namespace std;
using namespace chrono;

struct Foo {
    int i;
    string s;

    bool operator<(const Foo& other) const noexcept {
        if(i < other.i) return true;
        if(i > other.i) return false;
        return s < other.s;
    }

};


template<typename CLOCK, typename START>
static double getElapsedSeconds(CLOCK clock, const START start) {
    //cast to ms first to get fractional amount of seconds
    return duration_cast<milliseconds>(clock.now() - start).count() / 1000.0;
}

#include <type_traits>
int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
    if(argc < 2) {
        cerr << "Must pass in number of elements" << endl;
        return 1;
    }

    srand(1337);
    const int size = stoi(argv[1]);
    vector<Foo> foos(size);
    for(auto& foo: foos) {
        foo.i = rand() % size;
        foo.s = "foo"s + to_string(foo.i) + "foo"s;
    }

    high_resolution_clock clock;
    const auto start = clock.now();
    sort(foos.begin(), foos.end());
    cout << "Sort time: " << getElapsedSeconds(clock, start) << endl;
}


// sort.d
import std.stdio;
import std.exception;
import std.datetime;
import std.algorithm;
import std.conv;
import core.stdc.stdlib;


struct Foo {
    int i;
    string s;

    int opCmp(ref Foo other) const @safe pure nothrow {
        if(i < other.i) return -1;
        if(i > other.i) return 1;
        return s < other.s
            ? -1
            : (s > other.s ? 1 : 0);
    }
}

void main(string[] args) {
    enforce(args.length > 1, "Must pass in number of elements");
    srand(1337);
    immutable size = args[1].to!int;
    auto foos = new Foo[size];
    foreach(ref foo; foos) {
        foo.i = rand % size;
        foo.s = "foo" ~ foo.i.to!string ~ "foo";
    }

    auto sw = StopWatch();
    sw.start;
    sort(foos);
    sw.stop;
    writeln("Elapsed: ", cast(Duration)sw.peek);
}
Tagged , ,
2015/11/29
2 Comments
Programming

The C++ GSL in Practice

At CppCon 2015, we heard about the CppCoreGuildelines and a supporting library for it, the GSL. There were several talks devoted to this, including two of the keynotes, and we were promised a future of zero cost abstractions that were also safe. What’s not to like?

Me being me, I had to try this out for myself. And what better way than when rewriting my C++ implementation of an MQTT broker from scratch. Why from scratch? The version I had didn’t perform well, required extensive refactoring to do so and I’m not crazy enough to post results from C++ that lose by a factor of 3 to any other language.

It was a good fit as well: the equivalent D and Rust code was using slices, so this seemed like the perfect change to try out gsl::span (née gsl::array_view).

I think I liked it. I say I think because the benefits it provided (slices in C++!) are something I’m used to now by programming in D, and of course there were a few things that didn’t work out so well, namely:

gsl::cstring_span

First of all, there was this bug I filed. This is a new one to shoot oneself in one’s foot and we were not amused. Had I just declared a function taking const std::string& as usual, I wouldn’t have hit the bug. The price of early adoption, I guess. The worst part is that it failed silently and was hard to detect: the strings printed out the same, but one had a silent terminating null char. I ended up having to declare an overload that took const char* and did the conversion appropriately.

Also, although I know why, it’s still incredibly annoying to have to use empty angle brackets for the default case.

Rvalues need not apply

Without using the GSL, I can do this:

void func(const std::vector<unsigned char>&);
func({2, 3, 4}); //rvalues are nice

With the GSL, it has to be this:

void func(gsl::span<const unsigned char>&);
const std::vector<unsigned char> bytes{2, 3, 4};
func(bytes);

It’s cumbersome and I can’t see how it’s protecting me from anything.

Documentation

I had to refer to the unit tests (fortunately included) and Neil MacIntosh’s presentation at CppCon 2015 multiple times to figure out how to use it. It wasn’t always obvious.

Conclusion

I still think this is a good thing for C++, but the value of something like gsl::not_null is… null without the static analysis tool they mentioned. It could be easier to use as well. My other concern is how and if gsl::span will work with the ranges proposal / library.

 

Tagged , ,
2015/11/09
16 Comments
Uncategorized

Rust impressions from a C++/D programmer, part 1

Discussion on programming reddit

Discussion on Rust reddit

C++ and D aren’t the only languages I know, I labeled myself that way in the title because as far as learning Rust is concerned, I figured they would be the most relevant in terms of the audience knowing where I’m coming from.

Since two years ago, my go-to task for learning a new programming language is to implement an MQTT broker in it. It was actually my 3rd project in D, but my first in Haskell and now that I have some time on my hands, it’s what I’m using to learn Rust. I started last week and have worked on it for about 3 days. As expected, writing an MQTT broker is a great source of insight into how a language really is. You know, the post-lovey-dovey phase. It’s like moving in together straight away instead of the first-date-like “here’s how you write a Scheme interpreter”.

I haven’t finished the project yet, I’m probably somewhere around the 75% mark, which isn’t too shabby for 3 days of work. Here are my impressions so far:

The good

The borrow checker. Not surprising since this is basically the whole point of the language. It’s interesting how much insight it gave me in how broken the code I’m writing elsewhere might be.  This will be something I can use when I write in other systems languages, like how learning Haskell makes you wary of doing IO.

Cargo. Setting up, getting started, using someone’s code and unit testing what you write as you go along is painless and just works. Tests in parallel by default? Yes, please. I wonder where I’ve seen that before…

Traits. Is there another language other than D and Rust that make it this easy to use compile-time polymorphism? If there is, please let me know which one. Rust has an advantage here: as in Dylan (or so I read), the same trait can be used for runtime polymorphism.

Warnings. On by default, and I only had to install flycheck-rust in Emacs for syntax highlighting to just work. Good stuff.

Productivity. This was surprising, given the borrow checker’s infamy. It _does_ take a while to get my code to compile, but overall I’ve been able to get a good amound done with not that much time, given these are the first lines of Rust I’ve ever written.

Algebraic types and pattern matching. Even though I didn’t use the former.

Slices. Non-allocating views into data? Yes, please. Made the D programmer in me feel right at home.

Immutable by default. Need I say more?

Debugging. rust-gdb makes printing out values easy. I couldn’t figure out how to break on certain functions though, so I had to use the source file and line number instead.

No need to close a socket due to RAII. This was nice and even caught a bug for me. The reason being that I expected my socket to close because it was dropped, but my test failed. When I looked into it, the reference count was larger than 1 because I’d forgotten to remove the client’s subscriptions. The ref count was 0, the socket was dropped and closed, and the test passed. Nice.

No parens for match, if, for, …

The bad

The syntax. How many times can one write an ampersand in one’s source code? You’ll break new records. Speaking of which…

Explicit borrows. I really dislike the fact that I have to tell the compiler that I’m the function I’m calling is borrowing a parameter when the function signature itself only takes borrows. It won’t compile otherwise (which is good), but… since I can’t get it wrong what’s the point of having to express intent? In C++:

void fun(Widget& w);
auto w = Widget();
fun(w); //NOT fun(&w) as in Rust

In Rust:

fn fun(w: &mut Widget);
let w = Widget::new();
fun(&mut w); //fun(w) doesn't compile but I still need to spell out &mut. Sigh.

Display vs Debug. Printing out integers and strings with {} is fine, but try and do that with a Vec or HashMap and you have to use the weird {:?}. I kept getting the order of the two symbols wrong as well. It’s silly. Even the documentation for HashMap loops over each entry and prints them out individually. Ugh.

Having to rethink my code. More than once I had to find a different way to do the thing I wanted to do. 100% of the time it was because of the borrow checker. Maybe I couldn’t figure out the magical incantation that would get my code to compile, but in one case I went from “return a reference to an internal object, then call methods on it” to “find object and call method here right now”. Why? So I wouldn’t have to borrow it mutably twice. Because the compiler won’t let me. My code isn’t any safer and it was just annoying.

Rc<RefCell<T>> and Arc<Mutex<T>>. Besides the obvious “‘Nuff said”, why do I have to explicitly call .clone on Rc? It’s harder to use than std::shared_ptr.

Slices. Writing functions that slices and passing them vectors works well enough. I got tired of writing &var[..] though. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. Coming from D I wanted to avoid vectors and just slice arrays instead. Maybe that’s not Rusty. What about appending together some values to pass into a test? No Add impl for Vecs, so it’s massive pain. Sigh.

Statements vs Expressions. I haven’t yet made the mistake of forgetting/adding a semicolon, but I can see it happening.

No function overloading.

Serialization. There’s no way to do it well without reflection, and Rust is lacking here. I just did everything by hand, which was incredibly annoying. I’m spoiled though, in D I wrote what I think is a really good serialization library. Good in the lazy sense, I pretty much never have to write custom serialization code.

The ugly

Hashmaps. The language has operator overloading, but HashMap doesn’t use it. So it’s a very Java-like map.insert(key, value). If you want to create a HashMap with a literal… you can’t. There’s no equivalent macro to vec. You could write your own, but come on, this is a basic type from the standard library that will get used a lot. Even C++ does better!

Networking / concurrent IO. So I took a look at what my options were, and as far as my googling took me, it was to use native threads or a library called mio. mio’s API was… not the easiest to use so I punted and did what is the Rust standard library way of writing a server and used threads instead. I was sure I’d have performance problems down the road but it was something to worry about later. I went on writing my code, TDDed an implementation of a broker that wasn’t connected to the outside world and everything. At one point I realised that holding on to a mutable reference for subscribers wasn’t going to work so I used Rc<RefCell<Subscriber>> instead. It compiled, my tests passed, and all was good in the world. Then I tried actually using the broker from my threaded server. Since it’s not safe to use Rc<RefCell<>> in threads, this failed to compile. “Good!”, I thought, I changed Rc to Arc and RefCell to Mutex. Compile, run, …. deadlock. Oops. I had to learn mio after all. It wasn’t as bad as boost::asio but it wasn’t too far away either.

Comparing objects for identity. I just wanted to compare pointers. It was not fun. I had to write this:

fn is_same<T>(lhs: &T, rhs: &T) -> bool {
    lhs as *const T == rhs as *const T;
}
fn is_same_subscriber<T: Subscriber>(lhs: Rc<RefCell<T>>, rhs: Rc<RefCell<T>>) -> bool {
    is_same(&*lhs.borrow, &*rhs.borrow());
}

Yuck.

Summary

I thought I’d like Rust more than I actually do at this point. I’m glad I’m taking the time to learn it, but I’m not sure how likely I’ll choose to use it for any future project. Currently the only real advantage it has for me over D is that it has no runtime and could more easily be used on bare metal projects. But I’m unlikely to do any of those anytime soon.

I never thought I’d say this a few years back but…I like being able to fall back on a mark-and-sweep GC. I don’t have to use it in D either, so if it ever becomes a performance or latency problem I know how to deal with it. It seems to me to be far easier than getting the borrow checker to agree with me or having to change how I want to write my code.

We’ll see, I guess. Optimising the Rust implementation to be competitive with the D and Java ones is likely to be interesting.

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2015/02/20
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Haskell actually does change the way you think

Last year I started trying to learn Haskell. There have been many ups and downs, but my only Haskell project so far is on hold while I work on other things. I’m not sure yet if I’d choose to use Haskell in production. The problems I had (and the time it’s taken so far) writing a simple server make me think twice, but that’s a story for another blog post.

The thing is, the whole reason I decided to learn Haskell were the many reports that it made me you think differently. As much as I like D, learning it was easy and essentially I’m using it as a better C++. There are things I routinely do in D that I wouldn’t have thought of or bother in C++ because they’re easier. But it’s not really changed my brain.

I didn’t think Haskell had either, until I started thinking of solutions to problems I was having in D in Haskell ways. I’m currently working on a build system, and since the configuration language is D, it has to be compiled. So I have interesting problems to solve with regards to what runs when: compile-time or run-time. Next thing I know I’m thinking of lazy evaluation, thunks, and the IO monad. Some things aren’t possible to be evaluated at compile-time in D. So I replaced a value with a function that when run (i.e. at run-time) would produce that value. And (modulo current CTFE limitations)… it works! I’m even thinking of making a wrapper type that composes nicely… (sound familiar?)

So, thanks Haskell. You made my head hurt more than anything I’ve tried learning since Physics, but apparently you’ve made me a better programmer.

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