Comment by the__alchemist
Comment by the__alchemist 6 hours ago
It's such a surprising dichotomy! Rust tooling, language and low-level capability makes it my top choice in several domains. It strikes me as the best tool available in high-performance and low-level domains. I contrast this with your observation: most of the open-source software (libraries generally) I see in rust are of poor quality.
I'm building a structural biology ecosystem in rust, split out into several libs, and a GUI program. Molecular dynamics, file format interop, API interaction, 3D viewer/dashboard/manipulation etc. I also do embedded in rust for work and personal projects. In both of these domains (High-performance scientific programming/GUI+3D, and embedded), I have had to write my own tooling. Nascent tools exist, but they are of too poor quality to use; e.g. easier to rewrite than attempt to work around the limitations of.
I'm at a loss. When I talk to people online about embedded rust, I find people discussing design patterns I think are high-friction (Async and typestates), and few people describe projects.
I think part of the problem is that it has acquired a group of people who design APIs and write libs without applying these libs to practical problems, which would expose their shortcomings.
You're last quote hits the nail on the head. I've found that good libraries are written by people actually solving the problem and then open sourcing it. pytorch, numpy, eigen, ros, openssl, etc. these all came from being trying to actually solve specific problems.
I think rust will get those libraries, but it takes time. Rust is still young compared to languages with a large amount of useful libraries. The boost project in c++ started in the 90s for example. It just takes time.