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Ask HN: Haskell more productive than Rust?
4 points by dorfsmay on Nov 18, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
This question shows up a lot on different venue on the internet, but the answers seem to me as diverse as there are people answering. I'd like to hear from the HN crowd, specifically from people who have an extended experience with both modern Haskell and Rust. I tend to use Python as my weapon of choice, and love how much, most of the time, I can ignore that it runs on a computer and focus on my problem domain, but I run into two issues:

• performance: I've used different solutions to this, sometimes better native library, sometimes pypy, sometimes C for the whole thing, sometimes a different strategy, etc... but I have started to learn Rust to address this space and it seems to be the perfect fit.

• distributing to other users / dependencies: When I need to have other people use my scripts, then I run into the issue of having to help them install packages, and often on platform I don't know (different versions of Windows, etc...). This is where I am wondering if I Haskell would have and advantage over Rust.

Does Haskell allow you to be that more productive than Rust that you still use it for problems where performance and memory size is not an issue?

Do you still start new projects in Haskell? Or tend to start them in Rust now? If the former, where do you draw the line?

Thanks.



In Rust you have to manually manage memory. It's verifiable (which makes it way less painful than C), but still you have to think about memory everywhere. Even map'ing sequences becomes complex because of this. So I think Rust is not a good choice for, for example, web applications.


Actually I consider a web application performance/memory sensitive unless it is a small side project that I know will never scale.

I was thinking more about small apps that'll be used by a single user at a time and that deals with a known amount of data, where iterating fast is more important for me than performance/memory.




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