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I love Rust (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 16 hours ago by rustyfemboy@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml

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[–] r00ty@kbin.life 43 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] r00ty@kbin.life 10 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

The current thing I'm working on (processor for iptv m3u files) isn't public yet, it's still in the very early stages. Some of the "learning to fly" rust projects I've done so far are here though:

https://git.nerfed.net/r00ty/bingo/_rust (it's a multi-threaded bingo game simulator, that I made because of the stand-up maths video on the subject).
https://git.nerfed.net/r00ty/spectrum/_screen (this is a port of part of a general CPU emulation project I did in C#, it emulates the ZX spectrum screen, you can load in the 6912 byte screens and it will show it in a 2x scaled window).

I think both of these are rather using Arc<RwLock<Thing>> because they both operate in a threaded environment. Bingo is wholly multi-threaded and the spectrum screen is meant to be used by a CPU emulator running in another thread. So not quite the same thing. But you can probably see a lot of jamming the wrong shape in the wrong hole in both of those.

The current project isn't multi-threaded. So it has a lot of the Rc/Rc<RefCell> action instead.

EDIT: Just to give the reason for Rc<RefCell> in the current project. I'm reading in a M3U file and I'm going to be referencing it against an Excel file. So in the structure for the m3u file, I have two BtreeMaps, one for order by channel number and one by name. Each containing references to the same Channel object.

Likewise the same channel objects are stored in the structure for the Excel file that is read in (searched for in the m3u file structure).

BTreeMaps used because in different scenarios the contents will be output in either name order or channel order. So just better to put them in, in that order in the first place.

[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 hours ago

The bingo one actually uses crossbeam channels instead of mutexes, so that's nice. I haven't looked too closely at it though.

I don't think you can do too much about the Spectrum one if you want to keep the two threads, but here's what I would change related to thread synchronization. Lemmy doesn't seem to allow me to attach patch files for whatever reason so have an archive instead... https://dblsaiko.net/pub/tmp/patches.tar.bz2 (I wrote a few notes in the commit messages)

Just to give the reason for Rc in the current project. I’m reading in a M3U file and I’m going to be referencing it against an Excel file. So in the structure for the m3u file, I have two BtreeMaps, one for order by channel number and one by name. Each containing references to the same Channel object.

So basically it's channels indexed by channel number and name? That one is actually one of the easy cases. Store indices instead:

struct Channels {
  data: Vec<Channel>,
  by_number: BTreeMap<u32 /* or whatever */, usize>,
  by_name: BTreeMap<String, usize>,
}

// untested but I think it should compile
fn get_channel_by_name(ch: &Channels, name: &str) -> Option<&Channel> {
  Some(&self.data[*ch.by_name.get(name)?])
}

[–] beeng@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Go is really good for std library, windows and Linux from same code and static binaries BTW.