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0 pointsbrundolf2y ago0 comments

> Sometimes there is a crucial global state something that’s easier to just directly access, but I just write struct that manages all the Arc/RwLock or whatever other exclusive access mechanism I need for the access patterns. From the callers point of view everything is just a simple function call. When writing the struct I need to be thoughtful of sharing semantics but it’s a very small struct and I write it once and move on.

This is a recurring pattern I've started to notice with Rust: most things that repeatedly feel clunky, or noisy, or arduous, can be wrapped in an abstraction that allows your business logic to come back into focus. I've started to think this mentality is essential to any significant Rust project.

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fnordpiglet2y ago

Yeah it was a bit of a block for me as well, I don’t know where it came from, but I resisted wrapping things. Reality is breaking things up into crates is encouraged anyway, and just abstracting complexity away is Not That Hard, and can usually be pretty small and concise to boot.

I think I’m used to other languages provided a lot of these abstractions or having some framework that manages it all. The frameworks in rust tend to be pretty low level (with a few notable exceptions) so perhaps that’s where it comes from.

brundolfOP2y ago

Well for one- creating abstractions always comes with a tradeoff, so it's good to have some basic skepticism around them. But Rust embraces them, for better and worse. It equips you to write extremely safe and scalable abstractions, but it's also designed in a way that assumes you're going to use those capabilities (mainly, being really low-level and explicit by default), and so you're going to have a harder time if you avoid them

Another thing, for me, was that I came from mostly writing TypeScript, which is the opposite: the base language is breezy without abstractions, and the type system equips you to strongly-type plain data and language features, so you'll have a great time if you stick to those

But yeah, it's been interesting to see how different the answers to these questions can be in different languages!

Pauan2y ago

Rust embraces abstractions because Rust abstractions are zero-cost. So you can liberally create them and use them without paying a runtime cost.

That makes abstractions far more useful and powerful, since you never need to do a cost-benefit analysis in your head, abstractions are just always a good idea in Rust.

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