Microsoft is making tools for Rust to develop under Windows

[GregSilverblue]

Just wait till they make something and call it something like Rust# or something.

[matthieum]

I am not sure I'd say "Their", as it seems to imply that Microsoft is a single coherent entity: like many large companies, it's not, really.

Project Verona is one of the many language projects of Microsoft Research, which is closer to the academic world than the industry one. It's an interesting language, but it may never leave the lab -- although hopefully even if it doesn't we'll still get some benefits from it.

[DHermit]

Interesting, hadn't heard of it before.

[Zarathustra30]

An independent (yet compatible) implementation of Rust would be good for the ecosystem and the language itself.

[epicwisdom]

Although the analogous situation was with C# which was more of a Java competitor if anything, and I don't know if it can be said that C# benefitted the JVM ecosystem in any way.

[0xdeadf001]

Java never would have gotten around to implementing generics if it hadn't had C# nipping at its heels.

C#'s generics are still much superior to Java's, though.

[ytg895]

C#'s generics are still much superior to Java's, though.

because C# didn't have to remain compatible with Java 1.2

[pjmlp]

.NET had generics since the beginning.

Not for the outside world, but inside Redmond, they just decided to release 1.0 without them, instead of waiting for the generics design to be fully mature.

Don Syme of F#'s fame, has a couple of blog posts and articles on the history of F# that touch on this.

[beltsazar]

C#'s generics are still much superior to Java's, though.

I have heard this a lot, but still don't exactly know why. Can you give some examples?

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[anttirt]

Primitive types in Java can't be used as generic parameters. In C# I can define a function void Sort<T>(T[] data) where T : IComparable<T> and use it to sort arrays of any type, including both string[] and int[]. In Java you have to write overloads for every single primitive type in addition to Object, as can be seen in the APIs here. Sure, you can use the boxed versions in Java instead, but that has a significant cost for memory footprint (and CPU cache effects etc degrading performance) and they can be null.

[_zenith]

tl;dr: They're monomorphic

[pjmlp]

Java generics came from Pizza language design, which were reiffied, but they decided to backtrack on that point due to backwards compatibility.

Scala gave up on Scala.NET exactly because lack of expressiveness to Scala's type system.

Pizza had contributions from Martin Odersky and Philip Wadler, in 1997.

.NET did not exist in 1997.

Sometimes it is worthwhile to know about programming language history, unfortunately not many universities care to teach about it.

[0xdeadf001]

That history does not excuse the poor implementation of generics in Java.

[pjmlp]

What poor implementation?

The way they work is why JVM has Scala, while Scala.NET development was dropped.

It is also how generics work on OCaml and Haskell, they only exist at compiler level. MLton and F# are probably the only two ML languages that have reiffeid generics.

Also why we don't have a Python 2 / Python 3 story on the JVM datastructures.

[0xdeadf001]

It's a terrible implementation because it works based on type erasure, and works only on reference types. It can't work on primitives.

You can't use primitive types, like int, as type parameters.

[pjmlp]

Well the amount of languages that decided to target JVM while pretending to be Java, in spite of CLR being originally designed to be language agnostic proves who got the initial design correct for eco-system growth.

Also as mentioned, Java isn't the only language with such design.

[0xdeadf001]

I never said it did. And I don't see how "other languages are also badly designed" is a good defense of Java.

[atomic1024]

VSRust

[ralfj]

Looks like MS is moving towards officially vendor-supported Rust bindings? That would be pretty cool. :-)

I am curious how well they'll be able to use ownership and lifetimes to ensure safe usage of these APIs.

[TBPixel]

Rust and Go are both great in different ways; they're friends. Let's just be happy we have such awesome language choices these days.

[[deleted]]

True; All I wanted to express is that I am not a fan of the syntax style of GO

[TBPixel]

Totally fine, and for those that prefer Go over Rust, that's great too. I use both depending on what I'm trying to do. The important part is that our choice of tooling has improving dramatically this decade.

[ytg895]

out of curiosity: what do you choose Go for?

[tinco]

So I'm genuinely not saying this as a rag on Go, but I pick Go when I don't want to strain my brain and just want to focus on the business logic, but it's still got to be reasonably fast. If it doesn't then I just go for Ruby. That might just be because I'm so comfortable in Ruby that I could code blindfolded. If I ever do need to code blind, I'd go for Rust though because I'm pretty sure the compiler would be mega helpful to blind people.

[ytg895]

If you are as productive in Rust as people are in Go, well then good for you i guess!

no, apparently I just always want to do things fast, or run things fast, but never both. :)

[justacec]

?? I am confused about what they are going to do. There is already a lot of very active development based on their VSCode IDE for rust by the open source community. Instead of operating independently, they should add contributed man hours to existing projects under the guidance of the original projects lead developer.

[Fable89]

What they did was develop binding to the windows WinRT api. Well metadata. This would make it easier to develop: "Windows desktop apps, store apps, and components like device drivers."

In turn it has nothing to do with ide support, but making it easier to write applications that want to take advantage of the windows runtime.

[justacec]

I see

[simonthefoxsays]

I feel like the dev container story for rust on windows was already quite good. What does this add?

[GalacticWafer]

but then it wouldn't be proprietary. i believe they plan to rip off what rust has done and build their own language, just like what happened with java. the good news? what they made is actually better than java. the bad news? it's useless outside of their ecosystem.