I've been following Rust for a long time now, and I'm very excited about the possibilities. However, I don't have a CS degree, and my work as a full stack web developer has only put me in contact with garbage collected languages: NodeJS, PHP, and a little Python.
I just spent an entire week working on a chatbot in Rust, and I found the steep learning curve to be very challenging. While Rust seems to be a big win for teams that are accustomed to C++/C development, it does seem to be very demanding for web devs who always work with a garbage collector.
In particular, I was trying to use Iron to write an http server that could receive web hooks. Iron, quite sensibly, handles each incoming request to a server in a separate thread. However, as a beginner it's very challenging to figure out how to persist data between requests without writing to disk or persisting to a db. Mutating state across threads is hard. Currently, there's also no version of channels that are single producer, multiple consumer. I'm sure as the ecosystem develops, more examples will make this easier, but for now it's surprisingly difficult to figure out.
Fortunatey, the #rust IRC channel supported me all the way. It's a very friendly and active community, but without their support I would have probably given up.
I look forward to seeing more posts at this level of detail help those of us struggling to learn Rust understand how the experts use Rust.
I don't really think that's a problem with Rust so much as inexperience with languages that have no garbage collection. If anything, the problems you had would probably be exacerbated by languages like C and C++, which in many ways are deceptively simple, yet there are tricks to be aware of in every turn. Doing memory management is hard because of the nature of the problem.
I care a lot about figuring out how to teach people like you to use Rust. I've primarily worked in Ruby for the past several years, but I did have that degree, and C was my second language. So it's a bit harder for me, as I had my 'aha' moment with a lot of this stuff quite a while back.
I'm hoping as time goes on to include more stuff in the docs that's about generic systems stuff, rather than 100% Rust specific, exactly for this reason. The stack & heap chapter of the book (which is upcoming) is part of that. But, I gotta finish off the Rust-specific stuff first...
I agree with wycats: Rust is going to bring systems programming to a lot of people who haven't done systems programming before, just like Node brought a whole new group of people to server-side code. It's our job to give you the support you need to be successful at it.
I'm considering writing a GC for Rust next. It won't be as easy to use as the other GCs, but you will be able to put the ownership of stuff in the hands of the GC if you wish.
Yeah, a lot of people are excited about Rust for webdev, but there is a steep learning curve and it's quite different from the languages most are used to. For webdev I personally think Go will make it, it feels a lot like Python/Ruby when programming, even though it's compiled and probably faster.
So I'm not sure I fully understand why you would target Rust as a web development language in the first place except pure curiosity of working in the language, but it appears there's more to the story. You're excited about Rust's possibilities -- in web development or just in general? And you gripe it's "demanding for web devs who work with a garbage collector." This makes me pause and think, why are we talking about web devs in the first place? From what I understood, Rust is a systems language and by systems language, it means stuff a lot lower level than `route '/me' => controller.toMe!`
Thing is about web dev is that (1) it's a get-things-done playing field and (2) primarily just data delivery. The idea that you would want a language that doesn't have garbage collection is just silly. Why? What complex operations are you doing in each request/response cycle that demands this sort of computational horsepower? And if you are doing said complex operations, maybe you should rethink how you're delivering that data and creating it? GitHub is huge and runs on Ruby. Surely, you can't be wanting to use Rust to improve your performance are you?
> Mutating state across threads is hard
Yep, so maybe you should target a language / framework that abstracts this away from you? I wouldn't say anything usually but you say it's "surprisingly difficult to figure out." Come on really.. programming languages are not created just for web devs...
I don't know. If you're trying to be productive AND change your toolset, it sounds like you just want a typed language. I wouldn't put bet too much of your time-and-focus-chips on Rust becoming a language for web developers. Do you see many people using C++ to write their servers? Nope. And don't take my message the wrong way. It really just bewilders me because I see a comment like "Yea I want to help people like you!" and I'm like Huh??
FWIW Rust is intended to be more than a systems language, but is designed as a systems language first (but other use cases are all taken into consideration)
I agree, the #rust IRC channel is very helpful, with a lot of people nice enough to help you. It should be considered a feature of the language : having a helpful community.
I just spent an entire week working on a chatbot in Rust, and I found the steep learning curve to be very challenging. While Rust seems to be a big win for teams that are accustomed to C++/C development, it does seem to be very demanding for web devs who always work with a garbage collector.
In particular, I was trying to use Iron to write an http server that could receive web hooks. Iron, quite sensibly, handles each incoming request to a server in a separate thread. However, as a beginner it's very challenging to figure out how to persist data between requests without writing to disk or persisting to a db. Mutating state across threads is hard. Currently, there's also no version of channels that are single producer, multiple consumer. I'm sure as the ecosystem develops, more examples will make this easier, but for now it's surprisingly difficult to figure out.
Fortunatey, the #rust IRC channel supported me all the way. It's a very friendly and active community, but without their support I would have probably given up.
I look forward to seeing more posts at this level of detail help those of us struggling to learn Rust understand how the experts use Rust.