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The problem with rust, I always find is that when you’re from the previous coding generation like myself. Where I grew up on 8 bit machines with basic and assembly language that you could actually use moving into OO languages… I find that with rust, I’m always trying to shove a round block in a square hole.
When I look at other projects done originally in rust, I think they’re using a different design paradigm.
Not to say, what I make doesn’t work and isn’t still fast and mostly efficient (mostly…). But one example is, because I’m used to working with references and shoving them in different storage. Everything ends up surrounded by Rc<xxx> or Rc<RefCell<xxx>> and accessed with blah.as_ptr().borrow().x etc.
Nothing wrong with that, but the code (to me at least) feels messy in comparison to say C# which is where I do most of my day job work these days. But since I see often that things are done very different in rust projects I see online, I feel like to really get on with the language I need a design paradigm shift somewhere.
I do still persist with rust because I think it’s way more portable than other languages. By that I mean it will make executable files for linux and windows with the same code that really only needs the standard libraries installed on the machine. So when I think of writing a project I want to work on multi platforms, I’m generally looking at rust first these days.
I just realised this is programmerhumor. Sorry, not a very funny comment. Unless you’re a rust developer and laughing at my plight of trying to make rust work for me.
Do you have some public code you could link to that you’re having this issue with? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for Rc/RefCell, I think.
The current thing I’m working on (processor for iptv m3u files) isn’t public yet, it’s still in the very early stages. Some of the “learning to fly” rust projects I’ve done so far are here though:
https://git.nerfed.net/r00ty/bingo_rust (it’s a multi-threaded bingo game simulator, that I made because of the stand-up maths video on the subject).
https://git.nerfed.net/r00ty/spectrum_screen (this is a port of part of a general CPU emulation project I did in C#, it emulates the ZX spectrum screen, you can load in the 6912 byte screens and it will show it in a 2x scaled window).I think both of these are rather using Arc<RwLock<Thing>> because they both operate in a threaded environment. Bingo is wholly multi-threaded and the spectrum screen is meant to be used by a CPU emulator running in another thread. So not quite the same thing. But you can probably see a lot of jamming the wrong shape in the wrong hole in both of those.
The current project isn’t multi-threaded. So it has a lot of the Rc/Rc<RefCell> action instead.
But then you realise that the types of 10 constituent fields don’t implement Eq, PartialEq…
I do appreciate how newer C++ standards have made these kinds of things a lot easier too.
Define all comparison operators with just one one line using C++20
auto operator<=>(const ClassName&) const = default;Whoa nice, I need to keep this in mind.
It’s nice that this exists these days, but my god is it horrendously unreadable at a glance
That is completely incomprehensible lol
BuT ItS uNsAfE.
Only if you’re a bad programmer :/
This argument just doesn’t hold up. Software written by some of the best developers in the world still has these same bugs.
Why even use a language where you have to put so much effort into something that comes for free in many modern languages.
Haskell:
deriving EqIs that because it’s that simple, or just that the boilerplate is pre-written in the standard library (or whatever it’s called in rust)?
Yes, it is that simple. In Rust if you have a structure
Personand you want to allow testing equality between instances, you just add that bit of code before the struct definition as follows:#[derive(PartialEq, Eq)] struct Person { name: String, age: u32, }In Rust,
PartialEqandEqare traits, which are similar to interfaces in Java. Manually implementing thePartialEqtrait in this example would be writing code that returns something likea.name == b.name && a.age == b.age. This is pretty simple but with large data structures it can be a lot of boilerplate.There also exist other traits such as
Cloneto allow creating a copy of an instance,Debugfor getting a string representation of an object, andPartialOrdandOrdfor providing an ordering. Each of these traits can be automatically implemented for a struct by adding#[derive(PartialEq, Eq, Clone, Debug, PartialOrd, Ord)]before it.It’s because people put in the hard work of writing amazing macros instead of baking code reuse into the type system itself 😁 I’m a rust noob and I love the derive macro.
So it’s actually a secret third option! That’s pretty rad.
Derive macros are a godsend. There’s macros to automatically implement serialization as well. Basically a Trait that can automatically be implemented when derived
i’ve only read about rust, but is there a way to influence those automatic implementations?
equality for example could be that somethings literally point to the same thing in memory, or it could be that two structs have only values that are equal to each other
Not for the built-in Eq derive macro. But you can write your own derive macros that do allow you to take options, yeah.
Equality in rust is value equality per default, that’s what these traits are for. If you want to check pointer equality you’d use the
std::ptr::eqfunction to check if two pointers are equal, which is rather rare in practice. You can also implement thePartialEqtrait yourself if you need custom equality checks.
I’ve only had to implement equality in C# but that didn’t seem that hard of a problem. you just expand the operator = function
It’s not hard, just if you’re doing it for a struct with a lot of fields it’s a lot of boilerplate
I just use the HashCode class and compare the results.
Pretty sure there’s a source generator for it as well nowadays.
My IDE can do that for me. And it was able to do that pre AI boom. Yes, the code ends up more verbose, but I just collapse it.
So from a modern dev UX perspective, this shouldn’t be a major difference.
Even if the tool works perfectly, you have to run it every time you change something. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s still much nicer to just have a macro to derive it at compile time.
Then you should also override
Equals(object),GetHashCode, and implementIEquatable<T>.Thankfully a lot of the usual boilerplate code can be avoided using a
recordclass or struct:public record Person(string Name, uint Age);
