Microsoft has just king-makered the RUST programoing language it seems
( good thing
per tweet from the head of Windows security,”Microsoft is spending $10 million to make it 1st class language across their engineering systems, and an additional $1 million for the Rust foundation.”
Microsoft spent over 3 Billion to acquire Nokia. For a multi-billion dollar company to spend 10 million is next to nothing.
This is an experiment to investigate the advantages/disadvantages of RUST. Not in any way “all in”
Maybe “all in” is going a little far but seems a little more than mere “experiment”
see here
I’ve been writing Rust professionally at $dayjob for about a year now. It’s great, almost all the problems(*) that I had with C++ are just not issues in Rust. No build system issues(**), a dream to work with, and the ecosystem is so much better. You can do very high level things very fast with few concerns.
Use after free, iterator invalidation, wonky concurrency issues, and even stuff Rust can’t save you from like deadlocks are still pretty easy to debug. And the IDE support is better than C++, frankly.
Even with plugins there’s the wonderful nih-plug project for creating Clap and VST3 plugins. AU is a bit up in the air today.
* Rust is not ready for GUI yet. Especially not in plugins. There are some great projects like baseview, vizia but nothing nearly as mature as JUCE, and the “big” Rust GUI projects all depend on the same windowing crate that cannot support plugins yet. It’s a problem, but baseview is the solution with a lot of good work thrown towards it.
** There’s some nonsense to understand, for most projects Cargo is fine but for plugins or anything needing post build steps you’ll still need something higher level. I’ve used make, just, cargo-make, and the “xtask” approach but nothing is as fully integrated as CMake. Yet. Also performance is an issue.
As an aside, I dealt with annoying crap in XCode and Visual Studio for plugin projects that finally moved me to CLion during the earliest CMake support in JUCE because I was sick of having to use 2-3 different IDEs for cross platform projects. Today I work exclusively in VS Code and remote into multiple machines running the OS’s I care about and have one config for everything in a project, both for editor settings and debugging. Rust support in VS Code is excellent. C++ is pretty good. It’s very nice not having to use those IDEs or the projucer for project and build management, one tool for doing one thing is great.
I would say for most projects Rust is amazing. For audio Rust is immature. But it’s getting there, and there’s a pretty good open source community with liberally licensed projects to make it better, always looking for contributions. There’s even quite a lot of work in the embedded space.
thanks for those reflections.
v helpful to me
"finally moved me to CLion during the earliest CMake support in JUCE because I was sick of having to use 2-3 different IDEs for cross platform projects”
big hmmm - ive been hesitant to consider Clion due to its founder roots in Russia but since the whole company has now relocated in the West - if it really does work well for JUCE maybe I should reconsider. took a look at al their IDES many years ago and was v impressed.
Plus Timur Doumler ( ex ROLI ex NI Kontakt etc etc ) works there now at high level ( obviously… )
