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My “grand vision” for Rust

164 points by todsacerdoti

by its-kostya

6 subcomments

I write production Rust code that becomes critical infra for our customers. I got tired of nil checks in Go and became a squeaky wheel in incident retros, where I finally got the chance to rewrite parts of our system in Rust during a refactor.
I admit the skill issue on my part, but I genuinely struggled to follow the concepts in this article. Working alongside peers who push Rust's bleeding edge, I dread reviewing their code and especially inheriting "legacy" implementations. It's like having a conversation with someone who expresses simple thoughts with ornate vocabulary. Reasoning about code written this way makes me experience profound fatigue and possess an overwhelming desire to return to my domicile; Or simply put, I get tired and want to go home.
Rust's safety guardrails are valuable until the language becomes so complex that reading and reasoning about _business_ logic gets harder, not easier. It reminds me of the kid in "A Christmas Story" bundled so heavily in winter gear he cant put his arms down[0]. At some point, over-engineered safety becomes its own kind of risk even though it is technically safer in some regards. Sometimes you need to just implement a dang state machine and stop throwing complexity at poorly thought-through solutions. End old-man rant.
[0]: https://youtu.be/PKxsOlzuH0k?si=-88dxtyegTxIvOYI

by simplesocieties

1 subcomments

The rust maintainers need to learn from the mistakes of the c++ design committee and understand that not adding a feature at all is in itself a desirable feature.
For example, your section on effects:
> Functions which guarantee they do not unwind (absence of the panic effect)
* I actually don’t see how this is any more beneficial than the existing no_panic macro https://docs.rs/no-panic/latest/no_panic/
> Functions which guarantee they terminate (absence of the div effect)
> Functions which are guaranteed to be deterministic (absence of the ndet effect)
> Functions which are guaranteed to not call host APIs (absence of the io effect)
The vast majority of rust programs don’t need such validation. And for those that do, the Ferrocene project is maintaining a downstream fork of the compiler where this kind of feature would be more appropriate.
I think rust is in a perfect spot right now. Covers 99.99% of use cases and adding more syntax/functionality for 0.001% of users is only going to make the language worse. The compiler itself provides a powerful api via build.rs and proc macros which let downstream maintainers build their desired customization.

by pornel

1 subcomments

It's hard to see features through the programming language theory jargon, but solid theoretical foundations have worked well for Rust so far.
Jargon terms like "sum types" or "affine types" may seem complicated, but when you see it's actually "enums with data fields", it makes so much sense, and prevents plenty of state-related bugs.
Proposed "effects" mean that when you're writing an iterator or a stream, and need to handle error or await somewhere in the chain, you won't suddenly have a puzzle how to replace all of the functions in the entire chain and your call stack with their async or fallible equivalents.
"linear types" means that Rust will be able to have more control over destruction and lifetime of objects beyond sync call stack, so the tokio::spawn() (the "Rust async sucks" function) won't have to be complaining endlessly about lifetimes whenever you use a local variable.
I can't vouch for the specifics of the proposed features (they have tricky to design details), but it's not simply Rust getting more complex, but rather Rust trying to solve and simplify more problems, with robust and generalizable language features, rather than ad-hoc special cases. When it works it makes the language more uniform overall and gives a lot of bang for the buck in terms of complexity vs problems solved.

by Animats

8 subcomments

This may be too much advanced type theory for a useful language.
You can go all the way to formal verification. This is not enough for that. Or you can stop at the point all memory error holes have been plugged. That's more useful.
You can go way overboard with templates/macros/traits/generics. Remember C++ and Boost. I understand that Boost is now deprecated.
I should work some more on my solution to the back-reference problem in Rust. The general idea is that Rc/Weak/upgrade/downgrade provide enough expressive power for back references, but the ergonomics are awful. That could be fixed, and some of the checking moved to compile time for the single owner/multiple users case.

by Surac

0 subcomment

I do not write Rust. I have left c++ cause of the feature creep of the last years that made it even harder to read c++. Reading code is so important. Make language not unfriendly for readers and value the time people put into learning a language. I have seen many c++ programmers leaving cause they feel its an other language now

by bionhoward

0 subcomment

gotta admit i groaned a bit at this because it would make rust more complicated, but on my 2nd read i realized:
- some things (compile time bounds checking tensor shapes) are hard / impossible to implement now; "pattern types" could be great for that
- however "no panic" is already handled by clippy, might not be much uplift for doing that at a type level.
my 2c: it's great to be excited and brainstorm, some of these ideas might be gold. conveying the benefit is key. it would be good to focus on stuff for which rust doesn't already have a workable solution. i like the pattern types, the rest would take convincing

by pjmlp

4 subcomments

Reposting my comment from Reddit,
I had some Scala 3 feelings when reading the vision, I hope Rust doesn't gets too pushy with type systems ideas.
That is how we end with other ecosystems doubling down in automatic memory management with a good enough ownership model for low level coding, e.g. Swift 6, OxCaml, Chapel, D, Linear Haskel, OCaml effects,...
Where the goal is that those features are to be used by experts, and everyone else stays on the confort zone.

by undeveloper

2 subcomments

I'm not sure why people are so deeply scared. these are all pretty neat features for people who will need them (off rip seemingly mostly in the embedded world). It's not like the inclusion of these forces you to use them — I've never had to deal with unsafe rust for shipping web stuff, and I highly doubt I'd have to deal with most of these. For modeling's sake it would be nice to have pattern types and view types, I can see them being useful

by hardwaresofton

0 subcomment

Really excited for the possibilities here.
People undoubtedly thought going for Affine types was too much, and even simple things like null safety or enums-with-values and the prevalence of Result saw debate with minimalists voicing concerns.
A world where you could write a Rust program that is memory leak free with Affine types is one I want to live in. Haskell can do it now, but its just not easy and Rust has beat out Haskell with its mix of ML-strength types and practicality.
IMO these changes maintain Rusts winning mix of academia and practicality. Heres a proof point — dependent types weren't mentioned :)

by pkal

4 subcomments

From the historical sources I could find online, it appears that Rust's borrow system was independently invented, or at least they don't mention linear logic or anything substructural. This is kind of interesting to me, especially given the reactions in this thread, and ties into the general difficulty of PL research to find acceptance among practitioners, especially when presented by researchers (which I think is regretful, I like the ideas in the article!). Perhaps we really should stick to terminology like "function colors" to make effect systems more popular (or not, because the color framing makes it sound bad to have different colors in a program, IIRC).

by wewewedxfgdf

2 subcomments

No-one ever has the "Grand Vision" to cut something down to it's essential 25% and delete the rest.

by satvikpendem

0 subcomment

Finally seeing more movement on effects or what started as keyword generics, there was a big blog post a few years ago but not much public facing news although of course they've been working on it as Yoshua says in the post.
I truly do wish we get closer to Ada and even Lean in terms of safety, would be great to see all these theoretical type system features become reality. I use the `anodized` crate right now for refinement type features, and who knows, maybe we get full fledged dependent types too as there aren't many production languages with them and certainly not popular languages.

by jbritton

3 subcomments

When I wrote my very first Rust code, I was trying to write to a socket. I got stuck on this task with misleading error messages for the longest time. I finally realized I had not made the socket object mutable. I’m used to Posix where you have an integer file descriptor and I don’t tend to think of socket write as a mutable operation. At least it doesn’t mutate state that my app manages. Perhaps something in the kernel gets mutated. I believe the socket interface may have been intended to support queuing which is perhaps why it needed to be mutable. I might have needed a lower level api. I just mention this because I think it’s interesting as to how it should be typed when mutation is external to the app. I didn’t follow through on using Rust and this was long ago so I’m sure some details are wrong.

by semiinfinitely

0 subcomment

the most exciting thing about rust is that AI agents are good at writing it because its so highly structured

by shevy-java

0 subcomment

Rustee devs are strange. It feels as if they are on a mission. I don't fully understand it.

by jadenPete

1 subcomments

I couldn’t disagree more. Most of my company’s backend code is written in Scala, and most of our engineers dislike it because the language is difficult to understand, has way too many features, and has many ways to solve the same problem. I don’t want Rust to continue down this path, and I already worry with some of the syntactic sugar and type system additions being discussed that it already has.
A language’s type system doesn’t need to model every possible type of guarantee. It just needs to provide a type safe way to do 95% of things and force its users to conform to use the constructs it provides. Otherwise it becomes a buggy hodge podge of features that interact in poor and unpredictable ways. This is already the case in Scala; we’ve discovered almost 20 bugs in the compiler in the past year.

by arrty88

4 subcomments

I would love to have a use case to learn and write rust today. But i am deep in node and go services for my employer. Previously wrote java and c#. What are people writing in rust today?

by zamalek

1 subcomments

I'm terrified by the notion of try fns. Are we getting exceptions (and therefore losing one of rust's greatest features)?

by ozgrakkurt

7 subcomments

This sounds insane at this point. The language already has too many features. Would be cool if all these people with amazing visions could move it elsewhere.
Rust is fast tracking being as bad as c++ in terms of just garbage in it.
IMO the worst thing about c++ isn't that it is unsafe but it is extemely difficult to learn to a satisfying degree.
This is already kind of feels true for Rust and it will be surely true if people just keep shoving their amazing ideas into it.
IMO even async/tokio/error-handling aren't that well though out in rust. So much for keeping things out of the language.
Maybe Rust just wasn't what I wanted and I am salty about it but it feels a bit annoying when I see posts like this and considering where Rust is now after many years of shoving stuff into it

by esafak

0 subcomment

These would be great additions. I don't get why people don't want powerful type systems. Let the language work for you!

by plantain

1 subcomments

I used to hate Golang for not having generics and how verbose getting basic things done was. Then I read posts like this and realise, my god, Rob Pike was so, so right.
Do these people ever ship anything? Or is it just endless rearranging of deckchairs?

by irenetusuq

0 subcomment

[dead]

by phplovesong

1 subcomments

async rust is the worse async out there. I prayed that rust did not include a async at all. But the JS devs pushed it thru. That pretty much sealed my rust use. Im still salty.

by conorbergin

1 subcomments

Thank God for Zig