I like that I have to think in Rust before compiling, not after.
30
hanrahan - 2day
A nice patena on aged metal !
16
flying_sheep @lemmy.ml - 5hr
Cool parasitic fungus too!
3
oni ᓚᘏᗢ - 2day
...and not just for performance-heavy stuff or embedded development, but for shell scripts...
WHAT
10
5C5C5C @programming.dev - 2day
Honestly yes. If I need to manipulate the filesystem or manage processes with any amount of conditional logic or looping, I'd much rather do it with Rust than shell scripts.
The only thing I use shell scripts for anymore is completely trivial sequences of commands.
32
SleeplessCityLights @programming.dev - 2day
As someone who uses a lot of shell scripts and learning Rust, do tell more.
6
Ephera - 2day
One of the simplest tricks is that you can throw down a function, which you can call with a command like e.g. this: run("cat /etc/os-release | grep NAME")
by constructing a Command like so:
Command::new("sh")
.arg("-c")
.arg(command) //the string passed as parameter
There's proper libraries to make running commands even easier and more robust, but if you don't want to pull in a library, that's really easy to write out ad-hoc and gets you 95% of the way there, with shell piping and everything.
12
Ephera - 2day
"I think proc macros are a really big superpower for Rust."
Yeah, been working on a framework and proc-macros are really useful to simplify the API.
For example, previously I needed users to define a struct and then an impl block with a function inside. Well, and they need to do that a lot, so it was genuinely a bit of a pain to write out, but it also made the code feel more complex than it really was.
Now I've got an annotation, which you can slap onto a function and then it generates the struct from the function parameters and puts the function into the impl block.
And while you do need to be aware that the function parameters will be put into a struct and therefore you want owned parameters, all-in-all it still feels really nice to just delete dozens of boilerplate lines and an indentation level in the codebases where I've introduced it.
8
Billegh - 1day
It kinda feels like cheating for rust to publish a list of reasons why rust people like rust...
I like rust too, but this feels more like advertising than useful commentary on the language and its tools.
5
communism @lemmy.ml - 1day
Why not? Of course people who make something (in this case, a programming language) are going to promote what they make and share praise they've received. It's a pretty normal thing to do. They're not trying to obscure the fact that they're the Rust Foundation—it's on the Rust blog.
14
tatterdemalion @programming.dev - 1day
Did you read the post? It ends with several critiques of Rust.
5
Shanmugha @lemmy.world - 5hr
Honestly, I could not make myself read till that critique part. As much as I would like to hear what Rust actually is good for, that article is yet another cheap advertisement
2
Shanmugha @lemmy.world - 5hr
Well, it really is. Went for Rust from Python and gained faster execution - wooow, no waaaay. No other language can do that (sarcasm, and to add more to it: did they ever try to actually optimise code first?)
1
BB_C @programming.dev - 1day
/me putting my Rust (post-v1.0 era) historian hat on.
The list of (language-level) reasons why people liked Rust was already largely covered by the bullet points in the real original Rust website homepage, before some "community" people decided to nuke that website because they didn't like the person who wrote these points (or rather, what that person was "becoming"). They tasked some faultless volunteers who didn't even know much Rust to develop a new website, and then rushed it out. It was ugly. It lacked supposedly important components like internationalization, which the original site did. But what was important to those "community people" (not to be confused with the larger body of people who develop Rust and/or with Rust) is that the very much technically relevant bullet points were gone. And it was then, and only then, that useless meaningless "empowerment" speak came into the picture.
4
Shanmugha @lemmy.world - 5hr
Now this makes sense. Thank you from someone who didn't know
1
subversive_dev - 5hr
I'm a rust stan but honestly, I think your comment is correct. I remember the website change at the time, but what I didn't notice then was the catastrophic loss of information density.
The old bullet points really are the the money, they explained to anyone who knows programming languages what makes rust actually special. By contrast the new website suffers severely from buzzword-itis and design over content.
nemeski in rust @programming.dev
What do people love about Rust?
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/12/19/what-do-people-love-about-rust/I like that I have to think in Rust before compiling, not after.
A nice patena on aged metal !
Cool parasitic fungus too!
WHAT
Honestly yes. If I need to manipulate the filesystem or manage processes with any amount of conditional logic or looping, I'd much rather do it with Rust than shell scripts.
The only thing I use shell scripts for anymore is completely trivial sequences of commands.
As someone who uses a lot of shell scripts and learning Rust, do tell more.
One of the simplest tricks is that you can throw down a function, which you can call with a command like e.g. this:
run("cat /etc/os-release | grep NAME")by constructing a Command like so:
There's proper libraries to make running commands even easier and more robust, but if you don't want to pull in a library, that's really easy to write out ad-hoc and gets you 95% of the way there, with shell piping and everything.
Yeah, been working on a framework and proc-macros are really useful to simplify the API.
For example, previously I needed users to define a struct and then an
implblock with a function inside. Well, and they need to do that a lot, so it was genuinely a bit of a pain to write out, but it also made the code feel more complex than it really was.Now I've got an annotation, which you can slap onto a function and then it generates the struct from the function parameters and puts the function into the
implblock.And while you do need to be aware that the function parameters will be put into a struct and therefore you want owned parameters, all-in-all it still feels really nice to just delete dozens of boilerplate lines and an indentation level in the codebases where I've introduced it.
It kinda feels like cheating for rust to publish a list of reasons why rust people like rust...
I like rust too, but this feels more like advertising than useful commentary on the language and its tools.
Why not? Of course people who make something (in this case, a programming language) are going to promote what they make and share praise they've received. It's a pretty normal thing to do. They're not trying to obscure the fact that they're the Rust Foundation—it's on the Rust blog.
Did you read the post? It ends with several critiques of Rust.
Honestly, I could not make myself read till that critique part. As much as I would like to hear what Rust actually is good for, that article is yet another cheap advertisement
Well, it really is. Went for Rust from Python and gained faster execution - wooow, no waaaay. No other language can do that (sarcasm, and to add more to it: did they ever try to actually optimise code first?)
/me putting my Rust (post-v1.0 era) historian hat on.
The list of (language-level) reasons why people liked Rust was already largely covered by the bullet points in the real original Rust website homepage, before some "community" people decided to nuke that website because they didn't like the person who wrote these points (or rather, what that person was "becoming"). They tasked some faultless volunteers who didn't even know much Rust to develop a new website, and then rushed it out. It was ugly. It lacked supposedly important components like internationalization, which the original site did. But what was important to those "community people" (not to be confused with the larger body of people who develop Rust and/or with Rust) is that the very much technically relevant bullet points were gone. And it was then, and only then, that useless meaningless "empowerment" speak came into the picture.
Now this makes sense. Thank you from someone who didn't know
I'm a rust stan but honestly, I think your comment is correct. I remember the website change at the time, but what I didn't notice then was the catastrophic loss of information density.
The old bullet points really are the the money, they explained to anyone who knows programming languages what makes rust actually special. By contrast the new website suffers severely from buzzword-itis and design over content.