I decided to adventure myself in Tauri development for a personal project, I read the entire Rust official book and followed the exercises. When I first started developing it was like if nothing I learned helped for real life projects.
Now after getting betting up every single time I touch my project, it seems I’m catching things slowly.
But I’ve never seen such a hard modern language, I used C and C++ before and it’s incomparable.
How many years of experience do you have in C++, and which version?
Rust can be a bitch in its syntax, and its borrow checker, but modern professional C++ can be way worse if you use concepts and metaprogramming.
I’d also add that the borrow checker, to me, has a grossly overexaggerated difficulty/annoyance. It follows a simple set of a few easily learned rules, and in my experience, if you break one, it’ll tell you which and where. I feel like the type of C/C++ programmers complaining about it are mostly the ones that have mountains of hidden memory etc. bugs in their C/C++ code that Rust actually makes them clean up.
Edit: Another class I find are those who kind of just feel out the borrow checker blindly without sitting down for 20 minutes to learn how ownership works.
It depends what you’re trying to do. Some data structures inherently do not work comfortably with a single-mutable-ownership model, and while they’re not exactly ubiquitous, they’re common enough. (My exposure to rust is through advent of code where they’re more common than in the real world).
Rust doesn’t make it impossible, but you need to convert everything to Rc Refcell and there’s a load of annoying crusty boilerplate, so it is more difficult. And yes, the guards in those calls can prevent or expose nasty errors, but a lot of the time - in a simple app you’re writing to learn the language - the logic that keeps everything safe is so simple that an experienced programmer doesn’t even think about it, and then it’s confusing because it’s not clear what you’re being protected from :)
Do you really need that much Rc? That is, do you really need multiple ownership for a piece of data in a single thread? It is rarely the case, many times you can get away by just borrowing that data.
ARc is harder to avoid, since across threads you often really need the multiple ownership.
Next is, do you need RefCell? Or would a simple Cell in some of the struct fields be enough?
I recently picked up embedded in Rust and I often stumble upon the pattern of taking buffer references into structures, and I would want to pack the buffer and the struct that uses it together, but I don’t want to do self referential magic, so for now I keep buffers passed around everywhere
Yeah. That’s a huge issue rust has. However, it can’t be solved with Rc.
You either do it in safe rust, by “cheating” the borrow checker and storing a size offset of the buffer instead of a reference. Or just use unsafe rust and store a raw pointer alongside the buffer.
I mean, I don’t think that is a big issue, most of the time you don’t need self reference, and when you absolutely need there is a way even if not very simple one
No I’m not professional, maybe I’m mistaken. I just know C++ and made a few simple things, and then I tried to do a few simple things in Rust but it’s almost killing me. I’m asking myself if it’s worth it.
if it’s a hobby project you might check out zig, it has a lot of safety like rust but much simpler. just be aware major changes can happen as it’s not a 1.0.0 release yet but from my experience their change guide is really thoughtful and lists any breaking changes and how to upgrade.
I think that is kind of the main point of Rust, though.
It’s pretty easy to make something in C++. But it will very probably have a lot of hidden issues with memory, undefined behaviors and the like. Rust doesn’t let you make those mistakes that much, and forces you to do it correctly and securely the first time, which is why it is harder to get into.
They are mostly harmless and may never cause problems for you, but that’s how you get critical RCEs that are 8 years old in a software that’s now widely used.
If you don’t need this kind “ease traded for security”, in my personal opinion I’d go with Zig instead.
It’s worth it because it’s not C++. If I could, I would get a job writing Rust. Or Zig as that other guy said. My shitty opinion:
If your code touches sensitive stuff (eg. public networking) and needs to be low level, probably Rust (or another compiled memory safe language). Otherwise, just use C++.
But then what’s the point of Tauri? I mean there are plenty general use projects in Tauri, why’d they chose Rust?
Do you really need tauri?
Tauri is for web devs that want to make GUIs with web tech in rust. You can do GUIs without web tech.
If you really want to make a GUI with rust, you can use iced.
If you just want a GUI with web tech, do it in JavaScript+html.
If you want a GUI without web tech and don’t care the language, use a GUI toolkit for your preferred language.
Learning a GUI toolkit is hard. Learning a language is hard. Learning both at the same time is even harder than the sum.
Tauri provides native system plugins cross platform, that’s what I want, paired with the fact it doesn’t bundle Chromium, apps are lightweight and fast.
You can use Tauri with Iced too, it doesn’t require web tech, the strong point of Tauri is the native system modules.
I thought about using native tools only but I’m planning on supporting Linux and Windows at the same time, so that’s the appealing for me.
Once you’ve learned it, Rust is just a very nice compiled language to work with.
You get higher level constructs than in C++, a language without a billion weird edge cases, a modern package manager, and much more. In my experience, my code written in Rust is more likely to work as intended, both because of the stricter compile-time checks, but also because language features like sum types make it easier to check the core logic at compile time.
I work in both C++ and Rust, among other languages, but these days I never reach for C++ for a new project
Tauri is for using webtech with rust irc.
So if you want to use rust in combination with JS frameworks like reakt you use tauri.
A fake sense of security by pretending that simple apps that don’t expose low level interfaces and use wrapping libraries for all parts of networking need to be implemented by-design memory language, or for people who just like rust.