Announcing Rust 1.12.1

Not even on nightly? I know that we don't tend to mess with things unless they're behind unstable feature flags (which you presumably aren't using), but I'd be very pleasantly surprised if we managed to make nightly stable enough that you never happened to run into any compiler bugs. :)

For higher level stuff Erlang/Elixir is a much better option. Productivity will be way higher.

For lower level stuff Rust is a better option. Better productivity, equal performance, much higher safety.

Unless you have specific needs that require Java/C of course.

No direct experience here, but I know there is Vulkano[1], a Rust library that wraps around the Vulkan API. But until (and if) a SPIR-V target is available to the Rust compiler, the compute shaders will still have to be programmed in another language (typically, GLSL). This covers the GPU side of your interest.

I don’t know how things stand in the embedded Rust camp, however.

[1] https://github.com/tomaka/vulkano

Rust is a replacement for C++. It is meant to be a modern, general-purpose systems language, where "systems" generally means anywhere you need to be close to the metal. This includes areas like embedded systems and high performance computing. Modern means it has features and tooling you expect from languages in 2016. For example, on a language level, Rust has type inference, sum types, pattern matching, proper generics, and a decent macro system. A modern language should also be memory safe, and Rust opts to ensure memory safety at compile time with the borrow checker (as opposed to runtime with a garbage collector like in most languages). As for tooling, it also has a proper package manager, which believe me, is incredible compared to handling dependencies in C++.

So why would you choose Rust? If you need to use C++, because you need performance, or low-level access to memory, or any other reason, then you should choose Rust instead, because it's better for all the reasons listed above. The biggest strike against Rust compared to C++ is library support--people have been writing C++ and C libraries for decades, and Rust is a new language, so it won't have the same level of support.

I suppose if I identified with any language, C++ would be it. I have the most knowledge and experience writing code in that language. I've been learning Rust lately and have written a few toys with it. I'll share my thoughts.

1. The main benefit of Rust is its nearly cost-free safety guarantees. It's much harder to write code that is prone to UB with Rust than with C++. The comparison is almost silly, in fact, from that perspective. It comes with a runtime cost (e.g. drop flag checks, bounds/other memory access checks) in some cases, but for all cases other than those requiring even that last bit of performance this cost is tiny in comparison with the work the rest of the program is doing and well worth it in my opinion.

2. The primary reason for choosing it over any other language is context dependent. This leads me to my last point.

3. It would be fine to use for anything, really, but I think in the sense of "most appropriate" that you mean, it's "most appropriate" for systems programming that needs to be as fast as C++, but not necessarily melt-the-metal fast. Primarily this is because: a) it's as fast as C++ in almost all cases (and probably faster than equivalently-safe C++ in at least some cases) and b) it's much less likely I'll write code that smashes stacks, has data races, blows up memory or does a bunch of other crap that's trivial in C++ (or other languages). Even in cases where melt-the-metal fast is necessary it seems possible to do in Rust, but it just takes a lot of effort. That's deliberate on the part of the Rust developers, and it's difficult to argue against the reasoning behind it.

Where Rust might really shine is helping a new generation of programmers write performant code that is safe without having to learn by trial-by-fire.

I wrote a Donald Trump text to speech server in Rust. It's blazingly fast. If I'd written it in Python, it'd have taken seconds to generate audio. If I'd written it in C++, it'd likely have memleaked or segfaulted since I'm not skilled or patient enough to write safe C++.

Rust is pretty much the coolest thing ever in my opinion. It's easy and fun to write. Cargo is the best package manager ever, and makes importing library code a breeze. I've never had multithreaded code warn me when I don't lock it correctly. It's so awesome.

(wrt my Rust app, as soon as I load test and redesign the UI I'm going to share it on HN. It's pretty ridiculous and we have a lot of fun with it at work.)

Compared to C++:

- A fantastic package manager for your dependencies

- Easy build system

- A nicer language

- Memory safe

- Just as fast

- A way stronger compiler that will prevent you from making mistakes that you can make in C/C++ very easily

All in all more then enough benefits to make it worthwhile to switch unless there is a very good reason not to.

Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.

Featuring

  * zero-cost abstractions
  * move semantics
  * guaranteed memory safety
  * threads without data races
  * trait-based generics
  * pattern matching
  * type inference
  * minimal runtime
  * efficient C bindings

It's difficult to answer this question with 'one main reason'. Rust is what you get if you build a language that is intended to operate in the same space as C and C++, but benefits from the last 30 years of advances in programming languages.

Some things that are better as a result of things that are hard to do right in C++:

* Compiler monitors ownership of memory

* Compiler monitors ownership across threads

* Generics aren't handled as templates, and you can explicitly describe support using things like * trait bounds

* Macros are useful but need to operate on something more like the AST rather than text tokens

* A richer type system can help you express much more in the types (Rust enums)

Rust is basically a safe C++, written by people who like functional languages. Also, it has an official package manager in Cargo, something that C++ lacks completely.

As such, it targets essentially the same niche as C/C++.