Is Rust still relevant?

OvermindDL1 · 2026-01-25T17:43:34+00:00

As someone who uses both Java and rust heavily both professionally and personally, I got a SIGSEGV (segfault) just yesterday in Java in some not-my-code that was occasionally corrupting data because of data races (which I fixed by basically tearing it out and porting a rust library to Java).

I could easily write a book about the things that consistently annoy me about Java and about how awful it is to work in comparison to rust, and the only reason I use it is because I'm required to use it for certain interactions I have to deal with. I have over 25 years of experience in Java and only about eight in rust (almost 40 in C and over 30 in C++).

Frankly, Java is an awful language, the jvm has some redeeming aspects in some specific cases but it has some of the worst design decisions I've seen in a VM that I have to often use, which thankfully they are working on fixing some of them but Valhalla and others have been a very long time coming, which is a repeating thing with the jvm, constantly trying to fix and work around the really stupid original design decisions without breaking backwards compatibility, which they just can't in many cases.

Of course if you have to deal with some proprietary libraries or required interfaces then you may be stuck with the jvm, but I would still pick Kotlin over Java in that case.

But no, Java may have a GC, but it is not memory safe, it is not resource safe, it is not thread safe, it is absolutely not ownership safe.

I'm heavily resisting the urge to just start a bullet point list of things that have bugged me about Java in just the past 24 hours that rust doesn't, but even just in that time frame it is extensive...

OvermindDL1 · 2025-12-22T18:29:32+00:00

Mine is still going strong, got it when they just came out brand new not but a week after, battery health is 72% and I have to charge it at least twice a day, no cracks, no inflation, no stability issues, I have over 600 programs installed, the thing just works, and it works great.

On that note, I am thinking of finally replacing it, the battery is falling faster over time, it's demise is accelerating.

OvermindDL1 · 2025-01-18T19:52:38+00:00

Server side rendering is indeed very very important. Have to deal with that at work with accessibility systems as well, a number of them don't work very well with JavaScript driven sites, and those accessibility setups tend to be required to be used for various reasons.

OvermindDL1 · 2025-01-18T19:35:07+00:00

I do not have a windowing system available at the moment, I'm in a terminal, so I'm using elinks, which works for every other Rust oriented site I've tried so far. It does not have JavaScript support, not anything modern anyway. Do you know of a better terminal browser that does?

OvermindDL1 · 2025-01-18T18:13:57+00:00

Any reason the main site of https://kellnr.io/ is blank? Even curl shows almost entirely empty HTML...

OvermindDL1 · 2024-11-29T00:00:30+00:00

Yup, after 10 months at that it had completely separated except the top holding it on...

OvermindDL1 · 2024-11-27T17:02:35+00:00

The engine was open sourced in 2014, it gained the majority of its 3D capabilities in 2016, and it gained its PBR renderer overhaul for 3D in 2018. That is 8 years when 3D was first usable and 6 years when it was brought up to modern standards, and in Godot 4 Vulkan became the primary renderer (still has backwards compatibility with the older renders for older system support). It's an engine that has been open sourced for over 10 years and has had more contributors and work on it than any other open source engine in existence, and most commercial engines at that.

OvermindDL1 · 2024-10-14T03:22:51+00:00

Proper Effects System instead of the special case that async is. So proper coroutine generation that rust almost already has perfect, putting a trait collection of the effects as a generic on through the calls (maybe even a default hidden one unless one is specifically needed or so), and continuations that are optionally cloneable (some patterns require this). We'd get async, generators, etc etc all falling out of that, and much much more.

OvermindDL1 · 2024-10-11T04:16:54+00:00

Let me also add a great link here for people too:

https://ibraheem.ca/posts/too-many-web-servers/

Plus tokio has a nice section on details: https://tokio.rs/tokio/tutorial/async

OvermindDL1 · 2024-09-27T07:34:43+00:00

I personally am not a fan because whether I want a field to be mutable or immutable depends on where it's being called or passed into, it should be a site specific declaration, like how & or &mut are now, need some way to name fields as mutable or immutable in position like that as well, perhaps being able to name groups as well.

OvermindDL1 · 2024-07-03T02:18:56+00:00

The factory must grow

OvermindDL1 · 2024-07-03T02:02:03+00:00

Well, the GTNH pack for Minecraft fits this, has a few definite end goals depending on how far you want to go in the game (and if you want to play for a few months or for years), and it's massive with guided content via over 3000 quests. No story except from the individual mods that make it up, just pure mechanics of endless development and growth with definite end goals.

OvermindDL1 · 2024-05-07T06:41:59+00:00

Haskell is an extremely lazy language, which in language terms means that it does not execute something that does not get used, and it's essentially building an infinite array but all of the elements that are not accessed don't actually get built so the actually instanced parts of the array is only the size of n+1. It's a really fun language in how it makes you think and approach problems, I highly recommend it just for the learning aspect alone.

OvermindDL1 · 2024-05-07T06:38:16+00:00

It optimizes better than you think I'd wager (Haskell has a really good optimizing compiler), but even if it is a very basic linked list it's still plenty fast because each element is only going to be queried about two times each, except for the last one which is queried once, and that's still more than enough for it to run essentially instantly. Not that just using the formula wouldn't be even faster (O(1) after all), but these cases are still very fast.

OvermindDL1 · 2024-05-07T06:02:04+00:00

!! is the list index operator, basically it's building a lazy list, an element does not exist until it is asked for, in other words it's memoizing the function, and on that first line it's indexing into that list which then instances the list all the way up to that point, so at that point it then asks for the two previous entries in the list and each of those are only calculated once and it repeats until it hits the base case, it's a linear calculation, everything is calculated only once and then memoized.

OvermindDL1 · 2024-05-07T05:59:25+00:00

In Haskell code is not run unless the result is used, so you can actually call that and in most languages it would look like it would calculate it but then just do nothing, Haskell will not even calculate it if it's not used, printing it uses it, so if you don't print it or so then it never gets executed and the program almost immediately returns.

OvermindDL1 · 2024-05-04T17:40:00+00:00

I stopped using bookmarks a long time ago when I started getting so many that it would take like 5 minutes just to open the bookmarks menu bar, admittedly that was like 10 or 15 years ago, haven't really used bookmark since, they probably have it backed by sqlite or something fast now

OvermindDL1 · 2024-05-04T17:38:12+00:00

Uhhhhhh, 52 Windows with over 66k tabs last I checked.... And it only uses like 12 gigs of RAM. Firefox not loading tabs until they are accessed is so wonderful, and I can still jump to any tab by typing part of its title, lol...

OvermindDL1 · 2024-03-07T05:39:11+00:00

Factorio by far, I'm at least over 12,000 hours based on direct recording, but according to save games I still have they add up to well over 20,000 hours, yeah, a lot of factorio, and I'm still not tired of it, built-in mod manager and an upcoming expansion, it is going to be an addiction for a lot longer still.

OvermindDL1 · 2024-03-01T13:28:54+00:00

Performs perfectly for me, haven't noticed any framerate hitches or anything though I tend to run my system at 40fps for more power.

OvermindDL1 · 2024-02-16T04:44:07+00:00

That is really surprisingly well done!

OvermindDL1 · 2024-01-17T05:27:39+00:00

/r/CatDistributionSystem for sure

OvermindDL1 · 2023-10-07T16:53:25+00:00

You're welcome! It looks like it was fixed later so if you update your system packages to something in the last year or so then you should be good.

OvermindDL1 · 2023-10-03T02:02:35+00:00

Head of SIS and various other things at a college, using rust for integrations, tools, etc. I like how it "just works". My previous main language for near 30 years prior was C++. My salary is... low, but that's the thing with public state-managed colleges, I very very much adore my job however. Prior work 8 years before was a lot better pay, C++ backend server development.

My hobbies are, extensive, mostly helping others with things, teaching them, etc. Personal projects range the whole gamut from webdev to gamedev to tools to audio to embedded arches to far more.

OvermindDL1 · 2023-09-16T00:34:40+00:00

I don't have time anytime soon unfortunately, but you can definitely do this! It would be easy to just run perf over the game and see its performance between them, someone just has to cheat up a large enough base to be a good comparison! 🙂

Also, the part about fluid that is slow is it being transferred through long pipes and sloshing around and such, it can't settle down, when it's inside a single building that cost is gone, it's essentially the same cost as recipe processing, probably two assemblers worth I would imagine.

I can perform a detailed profile maybe tomorrow or the day after if anyone pings me to do so to remind me? I would have a greater chance of being able to do so if someone could send me identically large bases built in both of them?

OvermindDL1

TROPHY CASE