•  nous   ( @nous@programming.dev ) 
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    631 year ago

    Rust, it is a pleasure to work with and far more flexible in where/what it can run then a lot of languages. Good oneverything from embedded systems to running on the web. Only really C and C++ can beat it on that, but those are farlesss pleasant to work with. Even if it is not as mature in some area quite yet, it just gets more support for things as time goes on.

    • I have been wanting to get into Rust, but as an Electronics Engineer I essentially only have experience coding on embedded devices along with python scripting for test automation and data processing (fuck MATLAB lol)

      I am not a good at coding by any stretch. Everything I find on rust focuses on rust user-level or OS-level applications. Most of those concepts I don’t follow well enough in any case.

      Do you know of where I can follow tutorials, find more information, and dive into HALs for embedded applications?

      • Rust actually has a shockingly good embedded story for some parts. ST-micro is very well covered. Espressif has first party support. Nordic parts are supported by Ferrous Systems who certify rust for ISO 26262 use. Msp430 is workable, but requires a fair bit of knowledge. The story is less good for anything else that’s not a Cortex part. RiscV is definitely getting there though.

        https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/embedded-book/

        Ferrous systems knurling is actually a pretty incredible set of tools. I’d argue that they’re a better experience than most command-line c environments.

        https://github.com/knurling-rs

        They also have some pretty good walkthroughs for the Nordic and Espressif parts.

      • I would start by learning rust at a user level via the rust book to get you familiar with the language without the extra layers that embedded systems tend to add on top of things. Keep in mind that the embedded space in rust is still maturing, though it is maturing quite quickly. However one of the biggest limitations ATM is the amount of architectures available - if you need to target one not supported then you cannot use rust ATM (though there is quite a few different projects bringing in support for more architectures).

        If you only need to use architectures that rust supports than once you have the basics of rust down take a look at the embedded book, the Discovery book and the Embedonomicon. Then there are various crates for different boards such as ruduino for the arduino uno, or the rp-pico for the raspberry pi pico, or various other crates for specific boards. There are also higher and lower level crates for things - like ones specific to a dev board and ones that are specific to a chipset.

        Lastly, there are embedded frameworks like Embassy that are helpful for more complex applications.

  • DotNet Core as a whole (C# + F# + other languages that are being ported to compile down to a DotNet binary).

    Because it has all the things Java promised us - frictionless, painless, cross-platform programs - but is implementing it far better than Java ever could.

    Honestly, DotNet Core is now at least a half-decade or more ahead of Java in terms of the base platform and C# language functionality/ease-of-use. The only advantage Java has at this point is it’s community ecosystem of third-party features and programs.

  • I’d probably pick something esoteric and then just stop programming, tbh. I enjoy being a polyglot programmer, and learning many languages and learning from many ecosystems is incredibly interesting to me, far more than hyper-specializing in a single language would be.

  • Scala. Expressive, concise, can scale from simple to sophisticated. Sufficiently powerful - has metaprogramming, advanced types. Runs on a world-class runtime and takes advantage of a huge, mature package ecosystem that isn’t going anywhere.

      • Actually the language is quite small. The features, it has, are just quite powerful and have huge synergies so that it seems that you have a lot of complex features. It has a lot of weird corner case stuff, but most of that is because of the jvm and other languages have that too unfortunately.

        • That’s a good point about the synergies, something like eg. a type system that’s expressive enough to be Turing-complete is going to have some effects. You’re right that it might just feel like a “kitchen sink language” due to complexity of the features it has, but then again I suppose it’s sort of one and the same where a language’s complexity comes from.

          But it’s no Swift, at least; now that language really does have everything and the kitchen sink.

  • Probably Ruby. For some reason … no, that’s a lie … playing with Exherbo, Gentoo and Funtoo, but mostly Exherbo, made me loathe Python. However, everyone in the data processing arena seems to use it, so I’m bound to have to change my ways eventually! For “Ruby”: read “Python”.

    My days of needing high-speed low level languages are long gone. I learned C on Borland C++ back in 1990 to price derivatives on 386s. Loved it.

    If I mess around with any language it’s for fun. I intend to commit suicide, when my time is done, by the percussive head trauma that learning Haskell will cause me.

    • See, I love Haskell, and the reason I’d choose Rust for my one language is the feeling that in principle anything I can do in Haskell I can do in Rust, with a little extra percussive head trauma; but I can never have the control in Haskell to do the beautiful efficiency I can do with Rust if I ever actually did any programming.

      • That’s rather beautifully put and extra marks for p-h-t! 😁😜

        I learned low level stuff to give prices to traders before the trading interval ended. I’m serious. Our four man hedge fund was under the wing of huge French bank. Pricing in the era was painful.

        Asked for a price in the era used to take minutes for derivatives; I was told much faster wasn’t possible; that’s a red rag to me. I had no choice but to get dirty and go low level again.

        The traders were old style barrow-boys, their like disappeared maybe a year or so after. Derivatives have a load of parameters that go with the actual price, “the Greeks”, and market traders easily remember sets of shopping lists and prices and quantities at the same time. They were a shoe-in before computers were actually useful on a trading floor.

        I learned to program on a 6502 RISC chip in Acorn Assembler. I liked it because BASIC was shit in the era (GOTO Fcuk My Life), like it got much better … 🤣😂 Knowing how programs work allows me to try to make it faster. These days I think know compilers are smarter than me.

        Rust appeals too for the time-travel aspect. I’d like to learn to write a threaded program. I would have loved to do that when back in the day, I always regretted the way it worked, but it was way beyond me 😭 .

        I wouldn’t mind looking at my old original killer pricing program, I knew it could be optimised then, but I just didn’t have the time or the skills to go that extra mile. I regret that bitterly. 😡

        If you get time, let me know of your (t)rust travels. Bon voyage.