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.