Rust as a High Level Language

[shelby3]

@keean

How many times do you write the program vs running it? Even if it doubles development time, that is only the time of the people in the dev team. The runtime saving is for every run of every user, which is normally vastly more people. Therefore in total cost it is worth getting this right. For example a 10% efficiency improvement can save big companies millions annually in server costs.

How many times is (or more saliently what is the derivative combinatorial network effects explosion impact of) open source code read, edited, forked, and reused as snippets inserted into other projects.

Fine grained (i.e. localized) functional composition modularity is preferred over refactoring.

@shelby3

But how much does programmer time, maintenance, readability of code, and slower-to-market cost? Memory [and CPU] costs are declining exponentially, but we have very few methods of increasing programmer productivity. Thus I conclude the argument for prioritizing by default lower memory [and CPU] consumption is a losing one.

@shelby3

Lately I have come to view the programmer as the customer, not the masochist who I sacrifice at the altar to the "user". In other words, the living product is the open source, not just the executable. I hope we are headed to a world where many of the users are also programmers. The world is changing.

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@keean

Further if you use the collections libraries like C++ STL you don't need to worry about detailed memory management

But afaics those are incompatible with high-level functional composition which is where I am headed with this...

@keean

and GC will do nothing to help you if you put data into a collection and forget to delete it (it's still reachable).

Agreed, but I am going to attempt to argue that functional composition encapsulation may help immensely, at least w.r.t. to temporary objects. And none of the safe paradigms can help you with such semantic errors, so you've constructed a strawman to blame GC. Can you wait for my argument in a new thread?

@keean

My general point is don't roll your own data-structures, use the standard collections (vectors, sets, maps, etc). With generics most complex data structures can be encoded without writing your own spaghetti pointer code and having to do manual allocation. RAII has really changed C++, and as far as I can see is the normal way to do things in Rust.

Afaics, that isn't compatible with higher-order composition. We will get into that in the new thread I will create shortly.