The problem with rust, I always find is that when you’re from the previous coding generation like myself. Where I grew up on 8 bit machines with basic and assembly language that you could actually use moving into OO languages… I find that with rust, I’m always trying to shove a round block in a square hole.
When I look at other projects done originally in rust, I think they’re using a different design paradigm.
Not to say, what I make doesn’t work and isn’t still fast and mostly efficient (mostly…). But one example is, because I’m used to working with references and shoving them in different storage. Everything ends up surrounded by Rc<xxx> or Rc<RefCell<xxx>> and accessed with blah.as_ptr().borrow().x etc.
Nothing wrong with that, but the code (to me at least) feels messy in comparison to say C# which is where I do most of my day job work these days. But since I see often that things are done very different in rust projects I see online, I feel like to really get on with the language I need a design paradigm shift somewhere.
I do still persist with rust because I think it’s way more portable than other languages. By that I mean it will make executable files for linux and windows with the same code that really only needs the standard libraries installed on the machine. So when I think of writing a project I want to work on multi platforms, I’m generally looking at rust first these days.
I just realised this is programmerhumor. Sorry, not a very funny comment. Unless you’re a rust developer and laughing at my plight of trying to make rust work for me.
I find these videos give a very visual explanation and help to put you into the right mindset: http://intorust.com/
(You can skip the first two videos.)
Sort of when it clicked for me, was when I realized that your code needs to be a tree of function calls.
I mean, that’s what all code is anyways, with a main-function at the top calling other functions which call other functions. But OOP adds a layer to that, i.e. objects, and encourages to do all function calls between objects. You don’t want to do that in Rust. You kind of have to write simpler code for it to fall into place.
To make it a bit more concrete:
You will have functions which hold ownership over some data, typically because they instantiated a struct. These sit at the root of a sub-tree, where you pass access to this data down into further functions by borrowing it to them.
You don’t typically want to pass ownership all over the place, nor do you typically want to borrow (or pass references) to functions which are not part of this sub-tree.
Of course, there’s situations where this isn’t easily possible, e.g. when having two independent threads talking to each other, and then you do need Rc or Arc, but yeah, the vast majority of programming problems can be solved with trees of function calls.
The problem with rust, I always find is that when you’re from the previous coding generation like myself. Where I grew up on 8 bit machines with basic and assembly language that you could actually use moving into OO languages… I find that with rust, I’m always trying to shove a round block in a square hole.
When I look at other projects done originally in rust, I think they’re using a different design paradigm.
Not to say, what I make doesn’t work and isn’t still fast and mostly efficient (mostly…). But one example is, because I’m used to working with references and shoving them in different storage. Everything ends up surrounded by Rc<xxx> or Rc<RefCell<xxx>> and accessed with blah.as_ptr().borrow().x etc.
Nothing wrong with that, but the code (to me at least) feels messy in comparison to say C# which is where I do most of my day job work these days. But since I see often that things are done very different in rust projects I see online, I feel like to really get on with the language I need a design paradigm shift somewhere.
I do still persist with rust because I think it’s way more portable than other languages. By that I mean it will make executable files for linux and windows with the same code that really only needs the standard libraries installed on the machine. So when I think of writing a project I want to work on multi platforms, I’m generally looking at rust first these days.
I just realised this is programmerhumor. Sorry, not a very funny comment. Unless you’re a rust developer and laughing at my plight of trying to make rust work for me.
I find these videos give a very visual explanation and help to put you into the right mindset: http://intorust.com/
(You can skip the first two videos.)
Sort of when it clicked for me, was when I realized that your code needs to be a tree of function calls.
I mean, that’s what all code is anyways, with a main-function at the top calling other functions which call other functions. But OOP adds a layer to that, i.e. objects, and encourages to do all function calls between objects. You don’t want to do that in Rust. You kind of have to write simpler code for it to fall into place.
To make it a bit more concrete:
You will have functions which hold ownership over some data, typically because they instantiated a struct. These sit at the root of a sub-tree, where you pass access to this data down into further functions by borrowing it to them.
You don’t typically want to pass ownership all over the place, nor do you typically want to borrow (or pass references) to functions which are not part of this sub-tree.
Of course, there’s situations where this isn’t easily possible, e.g. when having two independent threads talking to each other, and then you do need
RcorArc, but yeah, the vast majority of programming problems can be solved with trees of function calls.Do you have some public code you could link to that you’re having this issue with? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for Rc/RefCell, I think.