Rust Alternatives

rust reviews and mentions

• Zlib-rs is faster than C
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Mar 2025

  A long-standing issue with that was just recently fixed: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/133250

• Simplifying SQL function implementation with Rust procedural macro
  6 projects | dev.to | 13 Mar 2025

  By the way, genawaiter is also an interesting library that uses the async-await mechanism to implement the generator in the stable version of Rust. As we know, async-await is essentially a generator, and also relies on the compiler’s CPS transformation to implement the state machine. However, async-await was stabilized a long time ago due to the strong need for asynchronous programming, whereas the generator feature lagged behind. The similar principles behind them allows their mutual implementation. In addition, the Rust community is actively promoting async generators, with native async gen and for await syntax entering the nightly version. However, since it is not integrated with the futures ecosystem, it remains in an unusable state overall. RisingWave‘s stream processing engine relies heavily on async generator ****mechanism to implement its streaming operators, simplifying streaming state management under asynchronous IO. That's another extensive topic, and we'll discuss the relevant applications if there is an opportunity later.

• I stopped everything and started writing C again
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Mar 2025

  Might not.

  Rust has a state of the art sort implementation. There’s nothing faster, in any language - https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/124032.

  And sure, it’s possible that someone could write a C program that compares in speed to all the Rust programs I’ve mentioned. C is a Turing complete language after all. I’m only pointing out that it hasn’t happened in practice.

  Also check the Android Binder code before (C https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/androi...) and after (Rust - https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/native/...). Same speed but the quality difference, it’s incomparable.

• Guard state transitions with proto methods
  2 projects | dev.to | 10 Mar 2025

  To be honest I don't think it is possible in Raku. It can be done in Rust using it's ownership transfers and borrow checker, but that is subject for another blog post :)

• Stack Traces Are Underrated
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Mar 2025

  > But Rust has a better workaround to create stack traces: the backtrace module, which allows capturing stack traces that you can then add to the errors you return. The main problem with this approach is that you still have to add the stack trace to each error and also trust library authors to do so.

  That's technically true, but the situation is not as dire. Many errors do not need stack traces. That so few carry a backtrace in Rust is mostly a result of the functionality still not being stable [1].

  The I think bigger issue is that people largely have given up on stack traces I think, in parts because of async programming. There are more and more programming patterns and libraries where back traces are completely useless. For instance in JavaScript I keep working with dependencies that just come minified or transpiled straight out of npm. In theory node has async stack traces now, but I have yet to see this work through `setTimeout` and friends. It's very common to lose parts of the stack.

  Because there are now so many situations where stack traces are unreliable, more and more programmers seemingly do lose trust in them and don't see the value they once provided.

  I also see it in parts at Sentry where a shocking number of customers are completely willing to work with just minified stack traces and not set up source maps to make them readable.

  [1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/99301

• Quick Diff ME 1.1: MS Excel files comparison tool
  7 projects | dev.to | 9 Mar 2025

  As to internal technology, it is written in Rust language and depends on them with big thanks:

• Node.js for developers course, chapter 0: installing and updating Node
  3 projects | dev.to | 5 Mar 2025

  Fast Node Manager lets us switch between them quickly. It's written in Rust which is a very cool language I know nothing about other than it runs really fast and is used for mission-critical systems.

• Effective Rust
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Mar 2025

  Box::leak was added two years later in November 2017 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/360ce780fdae0dcb31c...

  >Crashes, stability, and performance issues are still not safety issues since there’s so many ways to cause those beyond memory leaks.

  They aren't safety issues according to Rust's definition, but Rust's definition of "unsafe" is basically just "whatever Rust prevents". But that is just begging the question: they don't stop being serious safety issues just because Rust can't prevent them.

  If Rust said it dealt with most safety issues, or the most serious safety issues, or similar, that would be fine. Instead the situation is that they define data races as unsafe (because Rust prevents data races) but race conditions as safe (because Rust does not prevent them in general) even though obviously race conditions are a serious safety issue.

  For example you cannot get memory leaks in a language without mutation, and therefore without cyclic data structures. And in fact Rust has no cyclic data structures naturally, as far as I am aware: all cyclic data structures require some "unsafe" somewhere, even if it is inside RefCell/Rc in most cases. So truly safe Rust (Rust without any unsafe at all) is leakfree, I think?

• Fish 4.0.0
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2025

  The rust cygwin target has been merged (in a different attempt): https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/134999

• Building Type-Safe Rust Applications with Convex: Introducing convex-typegen
  2 projects | dev.to | 25 Feb 2025

  If you've been following the backend-as-a-service landscape, you've likely heard of Convex. This innovative platform has been turning heads by offering a unique combination of developer experience, serverless functions, and real-time subscriptions, all wrapped in a developer-friendly package. What makes Convex particularly interesting is that under the hood, it's powered by Rust – a language choice that speaks volumes about its commitment to performance and reliability.

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