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Rust 2018
Per the call for blog posts, I’ve got thoughts and ideas on where Rust can go in the upcoming year. My wants haven’t changed much over the last year or so: give me non-embarassing compilation speed! 😁
Before getting started, I’m very appreciative of the hard work put into the overall Rust community and ecosystem, including the behind-the-scenes work. It’s difficult to understate just how much time and energy people volunteer in pursuit of a better, Rust-ier world.
From my experience using Rust in Rusoto for over two years (shortly after Rust 1.0’s release):
Where we’ve been
- Compilation speed: unbearably slow for someone used to Go
- Documentation, official or otherwise, was sparse
- Compiler errors were often difficult to decipher to understand what the actual problem is
- Standard formatting or style guide wasn’t well formed, hard to enforce and slow to address interesting syntax edge cases
- Young ecosystem with many libraries/packages not yet created
Sharp edges still present as of Jan 2018
- We’re still missing libraries other languages have built-in or available
- Compilation speed
- IDE support needs improvement: IntelliJ IDEA’s Rust plugin and the VS Code Rust plugin are okay
- Compilation speed: yes, it’s listed again
Improvements I’d love to see
- Compilation speed boost
- More examples, more blog posts, more docs, more books
Optimistic for 2018
Despite continually beating up on rustc’s compilation times, our computers are getting faster (despite exciting side channel attacks and performance-reducing mitigations around them) and rustc’s performance is still making strides to being better.
As cloud computing continues to gain momentum and use, efficient utilization of cloud resources means a smaller bill: Rust will continue to make inroads here, thanks to its knock-down, drag-out performance capacity.
Crates.io continues to grow as more libraries are added. I’m excited to see gaps filled and libraries reaching 1.0.
More and more guides, tutorials and walkthroughs are being published. Soon the ecosystem will have more comprehensive documentation to ease learning.
I find it difficult to imagine a world where Rust isn’t a smashing success in the next few years. We’ll keep pushing towards that wonderfully safe future. 👍