from Hacker News

Path to Rust – A practical introduction

by sargas on 6/1/16, 6:06 PM with 20 comments

• by sargas on 6/1/16, 10:35 PM

  The article itself points to a HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11774850

  I didn't see it until it was mentioned here.

  I can't seem to delete this discussion. So I added the original link here. Please head there.

• by smitherfield on 6/1/16, 9:34 PM

  Rust is an interesting language, although I haven't really had the time to really sit down and play with it (just switched jobs to become a mobile developer while knowing no Swift/Obj-C and not much Java, so I've got my hands full for at least a few weeks).

  I've been watching Rust on that Benchmarks Game site for a while — it's been interesting to see it go from worse than Java a year or so ago to competitive with C++. It was slightly beating C++ for a couple days, although just recently C++ took its biggest lead in a while[0]; I think they upgraded the GCC version they were using.

  Anyway, I'm very curious whether it ultimately turns out that, as advertised, Rust's performance characteristics really are as good or better than C++'s[1].

  [0] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programs-...

  [1] The "Benchmarks Game" site very fairly specifies the algorithm that must be used for each benchmark — many of them say data must be operated on sequentially, so IMO Rust is getting a bit of an unfair advantage if the compiler is able to be particularly aggressive at autovectorizing it.

  OTOH that is a nice real-world speedup, and anything else that's implemented with LLVM or GCC also has access to that optimization, so YMMV.

• by klapinat0r on 6/1/16, 6:31 PM

  Previous (fruitful) discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11774850

• by foota on 6/1/16, 8:56 PM

  I decided to try out rust in a game jam hosted at my university a few weeks ago. It was a great learning experience, which is to say that it was incredibly frustrating in a good way.