from Hacker News

When rustc explodes

by milen on 7/13/22, 6:39 PM with 108 comments

• by nbittich on 7/14/22, 3:23 AM

  I don't see how rust will manage to fix async await, unless making a v2 of the language. While working with sync rust is often a very pleasant experience, everytime I used async await was awful. To the point that I avoid using rust for web /networking stuff, any other option is better. It's also very discouraging to read some people telling there's no issue with async await. Of course if you use a thousands of libraries (that are more or less hacks), and never use trait and generics, it's probably a decent experience half of the time I'd say.

  It's something I've only encountered with rust community, in Java when a feature sucks, we just say it sucks. Even the architect that approved it will say it sucks.

• by rowanG077 on 7/13/22, 9:34 PM

  I recently started a Rust project coming from mostly writing Haskell in my job and oh boy was I surprised. I was expecting long compile times because of the complaints I read about everywhere. But in fact compilation is very speedy. Much, much faster then I'm used to with GHC in fact.

• by PoignardAzur on 7/13/22, 9:41 PM

  Every time I read one of these posts digging into logs and flsmegraphs I think "man, there really should be a simpler way to understand what a compiler is doing when you feed it code".

• by stephc_int13 on 7/14/22, 11:26 AM

  I am not super familiar with the Rust syntax, but simply glancing over it made me puke.

  How is that considered good design?

  It seems even worse than C++ nightmarish Boost/templates meta-programming.

  Powerful, maybe, but what about readable?

• by a_t48 on 7/14/22, 5:23 AM

  I sympathize with this, after tracking down C++ performance issues (though not going as far as recompiling the compiler).

• by DC-3 on 7/14/22, 12:27 AM

  warp is quite a nice framework but it has a really bad tendency to blow up compiletimes in my experience. I think for non trivial projects in the future I will prefer something else because it can be a real sore spot.

• by svnpenn on 7/13/22, 9:58 PM

  > The crux of the problem is "gee grandma, what big types you have there", because... essentially, tower is a couple of important traits.

  > And the basic idea is "oh shit we don't have async trait methods" (hence the Future associated type) but also "backpressure is love, backpressure is life", by way of the poll_ready method.

  I really don't like this guys style of writing. It seems like the bones of the article are interesting, but then they slap like three layers of meme talk, irony and sarcasm, and it just ruins the read for me. It reminds me of TARS humor setting. It doesn't need to be zero, but its currently at like 98, can we turn it down some?

• by ArrayBoundCheck on 7/13/22, 11:08 PM

  Rough. It seems like there's a lot of poor engineering in the compiler :( I almost wonder if the new gcc backend will be better but then I remember clang is significantly faster than gcc