Mindset of the D team vs the Rust team

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 03/25/2016 01:42 PM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> On 24/03/2016 17:50, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 03/24/2016 12:50 PM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>>> And this is one of the reasons why I've essentially moved from D to
>>> Rust.
>>
>> It would be interesting to share a few thoughts about your experience
>> with Rust if you have the time. Thanks! -- Andrei
>>
>>
>
> If you're looking for an experience of someone who moved to writing a
> significant code base in Rust, that's not me. The most Rust code I've
> written so far is just this https://github.com/RustDT/Rainicorn - about
> 1-2 man-weeks of effort. and I don't even consider myself proficient in
> Rust yet. (it's damn complicated to master!)
>
> What I meant with my comment above is that I've moved my *time and
> effort investment* from D to Rust, but that doesn't mean the investment
> was writing D or Rust code directly. Rather it has more to do with
> projects like DDT (https://github.com/DDT-IDE/DDT), a project I've
> worked on and off since 2008, but fairly intensively in the last 4-5 few
> years. The DDT IDE has its own D parser and semantic engine (for code
> completion, find definition, etc.), that I built from scratch, and have
> been improving throughout these years. About a year ago or so, I was on
> the verge of massive improvements in this engine.
>
> On one hand it would begin to support template instantiation (not
> perfectly, but enough to support code completion well enough in the
> majority of cases). Most of the groundwork necessary to have this
> analysis work in a lazy and incremental way - such that it would perform
> well under the interactive nature of an editor - was done already.
>
> Another thing nearly completed was refactoring the engine out of Eclipse
> itself, so that it could be run externally, as a daemon process. In a
> way quite similar to DCD, Go oracle, RLS, etc. The groundwork for all
> this was done (also implementing caching, etc.). I think this would have
> been quite interesting because with the template improvements above, the
> DDT engine would have been fairly more advanced than DCD currently, and
> be available to other D IDEs/editors (especially since Eclipse is not
> that popular nowadays, and I'm the first admit, fairly so - Eclipse
> sucks in certain regards)
>
> I was already a bit worried 2-3 years ago when Go came into the scene.
> It would definitely take a bit of mind-share out of D, but like you
> said, Go is not really a competitor to D, so it wasn't that significant...
>
> But then queue Rust coming in to the scene, and essentially I rapidly
> lost my motivation to work in D-specific tools once I looked more into
> Rust.
>
> DDT will still be maintained, but only because I've refactored the
> IDE-generic code into a language-agnostic framework, and built
> https://github.com/RustDT/RustDT and
> https://github.com/GoClipse/goclipse with it. But I won't be working on
> the DDT semantic engine anymore, as far as things stand.

Thanks for the account and good luck with the Rust experience. -- Andrei