-In many respects Rust is a competent but not particularly novel
-language.
+Hi. This talk is going to be, mostly, a plug for Rust.
-Powerful.
+Those of you who know me may find this surprising. After all Rust in
+its current form is only about 4 years old, and I myself only learned
+it in December. I'm not known for liking new things :-). All I can
+say is that I tried it and have been impressed.
-Reference to Blub languages.
+In most respects Rust is a competent but not particularly novel
+language. It has one novel feature, but the rest feels like a
+collation of good and established features from other competent
+languages.
+
+Rust is most often seen as a competitor to C and C++. That's fair as
+far as it goes: certainly there are few reasons to use C or C++ over
+Rust for an entirely new project. But for me, Rust's power and
+flexibility mean its appeal is much wider than that.
B======================================================================B
[ slide with interface stability ]
-The Rust project is quite careful about language and library
-stability. They make a clear distinction between stable and unstable
-features, and try quite hard to avoid backward-incompatible changes to
-anything which has been declared as stable.
+Since declaring 1.0 in 2015, the Rust project has been quite careful
+about language and library stability. They make a clear distinction
+between stable and unstable features, and try quite hard to avoid
+backward-incompatible changes to anything which has been declared as
+stable.
[ slide with error message ]
involved switching between Rust and C++ and Perl. This kind of thing
throws differences between languages into sharp relief.
-Rust is now my language of choice for many nontrivial programs. I'll
-probably still use Perl for small programs with a lot of string
-processing, and of course I often end up choosing a language for a
-project based on the availability of good libraries in the problem
-domain. I don't think I would now want to start a new project in C or
-C++.
+Rust is now my language of choice for many nontrivial programs.
+Certainly I would try to avoid starting a new program in C or C++.
+
+Rust's compile-time type checking and its performance can make it an
+attractive alternative to scripting languages like Python, Perl and
+Tcl. Its macro system, and consistent high performance, can make it
+an attractive alternative to Haskell or Ocaml.
+
+I'll still start new programs in many of those other languages, and
+often I choose a language for its libraries. But for me Rust will
+now often be my preferred choice, if I can get away with it.
If you want to know more, there's a wealth of stuff online. The place
to start is probably https://docs.rust-lang.org/. And of course I'd
~ijackson / talk-2019-ghm-rust.git / blobdiff