Yes it's on my infinite todo list. I'm just being too much of a curmudgeon about the available textbooks, and had a sinking feeling when the main one didn't get "hello world" out of the way on page 1, and shift to the specifics of the language.
Thanks, Rustlings doesn't sound like what I want either. I was hoping for a counterpart of Stroustrup's C++ Reference Manual, or Riehle's "Ada Distilled" or even K&R's book on C. Something that systematically describes the language rather than distractions like the toolchain, mini projects, cutesey analogies, etc. I'm being too persnickity though, mostly because it hasn't been important to me so far.
Sure you can spawn threads but now you have all the hazards of shared memory and locks, giving the 2.0 version of aliasing errors and use-after-free bugs. Also, those are POSIX threads, which are quite heavyweight compared to the in-process multitasking of Golang etc. So I would say that's not really an answer.
True about Google ;). Yes, there are programs that really don't want GC. I consider those to mostly be niche applications since most of us are fine with using e.g. Python, which has automatic storage management (won't quibble about whether it is GC per se) that has occasional pauses. SImilarly, tons of important programs are written in Java, which is GC'd. Of course Java is tied up with Oracle just like Go is tied up with Google.
Go's main problem from what I can tell is that the language itself is too old fashioned. I've used it but am not expert. It feels like an improved version of C, rather than a modern, type-safe language.
I had the impression Rust doesn't handle concurrency particularly well, at least no better than Python, which does it badly (i.e. with colored functions). Golang, Erlang/Elixir, and GHC (Haskell) are way better in that regard, though they each have their own unrelated issues. I had believed for a while that Purescript targeting the Erlang VM and with all the JS tooling extirpated might be the answer, but that was just a pipe dream and I don't know if it was really workable.
Thanks, and interesting point about Wasm if that is important. You can also compile C++ to wasm but then its C++ ;). I don't know about Ada to Wasm.
I don't think Rust is quite mainstream yet either. My impression is that its type system has not caught up with Haskell's except in a few areas, but of course nobody pretends Haskell is mainstream. I haven't yet tried Idris.
Golang seems to have a decent runtime model (lightweight threads, GC) though the language itself is underpowered. There is a Golang backend for Purescript that sounded interesting to me. The thing that turned me off the most about Purescript was the JS tooling. Purescript (purescript.org) is/was a Haskell-like language that transpiles to JS, intended for use in browsers, but Typescript filled this space before Purescript got much traction. That felt unfortunate to me.
I don't think HLL (high level language) has an official definition, but informally to me it has generally meant that the language is GC'd and that the native integer type is unbounded (bignum). By that standard, Rust and Ada are low level. I've so far thought of Rust as a modernized Ada with curly braces and more control of dynamic memory reclamation. Maybe there is more going on than that. Ada is still ahead of Rust in some ways, like generic packages, but Rust is working on that.
If you have a suggestion of a no-nonsense Rust book, I'd be interested in looking at it. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ beat around the bush way too long before discussing the language, but I guess I should spend more time with it.
The JS tooling universe has always seemed like a Lovecraftian hellscape to me. I've managed to stay away from it so far, but if I were caught in it, of course I'd be trying to escape any way I could. It sounds like Rust's attraction here has been as a viable escape corridor rather than anything about Rust per se.
In particular, I get that everyone wants their code to be faster, and I get that certain bloaty apps (browsers) need to get their memory footprint under control, and a few niche areas (OS kernels, realtime control) can't stand GC pauses. Other than that though, what is the attraction of Rust for stuff like tooling? As opposed to a (maybe hypothetical) compiled, GC'd language with a good type system and not too much abstraction inversion (Haskell's weakness, more or less).
Has Golang fizzled? It has struck me as too primitive, but basically on the right track.
Rust seems neat from a language geek perspective, but from what I can tell, it requires considerable effort from the programmer handle a problem (manual storage reclamation) that most programs don't really have. I do want to try it sometime. So the Rust question is intended as more inquisitive/head scratching rather than argumentative.
I don't think it's been 10y. I just checked and she's 22 now. She started protesting with she was 15. So more like 7y. That would have been during the 1st Trump admin I guess.
Empty shelves at Costco today. Sign saying limit 3 eggs per customer. I'm sure they meant 3 packages, or at least I hope that did. Price label was around $4 per dozen.
Yes it's on my infinite todo list. I'm just being too much of a curmudgeon about the available textbooks, and had a sinking feeling when the main one didn't get "hello world" out of the way on page 1, and shift to the specifics of the language.