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  • Hacker News
  • Good news they adopted Rust as Tier-1 language. I hope their Weather app stop consuming more than 1GB RAM https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-s-built-in-Weather-...
    by meerita
  • It won't, that 1GB+ belongs to Microsoft's advertisers and their many video ads
    by jordand
  • If they can't do it with infinity budget and infinity AI, they're not going to be able to do it with that plus Rust.

    Hilarious that the article is like "Apple's weather app is only 200MB!"

    The day that OS vendors started abandoning native apps was a hilarious day.

    by pessimizer
  • But Tier-1 app consuming Tier-1 RAM seems officially approved.
    by geodel
  • Whether vibecoded Rust will be better than whatever they are doing now remains to be seen.
    by isolay
  • That's less because of what it's implemented in - and more to do with all the tracking and libraries they want to reuse...

    BigCo apps will take up lots of space and memory for BigCo reasons - obviously less if it's in Rust vs Go vs Python, but you could easily write Go apps that use far less memory than Rust apps written at BigCo due to BigCo reasons.

    It's just not really that much of a priority for them to have their weather app use less than 1GB of memory. It's a far bigger priority for someone to insist that somebody else uses some bloated framework so they can get promoted.

    by onlyrealcuzzo
  • The problem is the Webview2 prevalence, and note many Rust projects love their webviews as well.
    by pjmlp
  • Calling the Weather app an 'app' is doing all the Win32, WPF, WinForms and WinUI developers a huge disservice.

    It is essentially an entire Chromium instance around msn.com/weather.

    by delta_p_delta_x
  • I feel like the weather app makes a lot of sense from a corporate politics point of view.

    A 1mb weather app would have a significantly less impressive pie chart associated with it come "here are our improvements" presentation.

    Also if times get tough and you're told to reduce headcount by 10%, who do you want to get rid of. Sally who knows the USB driver end to end or Todd who wrote the bloated 1gb weather app. (Don't feel bad for Todd, he knew what he was getting himself into.)

    by Verdex
  • I've been writing Rust professionally for the last 5 years (where my first decade of professional experience started in frontend, then moved down the stack TypeScript/Node, Go, C# and so on).

    From the perspective of high level application development, I can't see a technical use case for a language other than Rust these days. If wasm worked (and MacOS/Windows/Android/iOS native UI support existed), I would write my backends and frontends exclusively in Rust.

    From a low level programming perspective, the high performance of Rust combined with the self-describing type system makes it very ergonomic to use (trying to figure out how a C function signature translates to behavior is a frustrating experience for me).

    The thing I have been most saddened about is the lack of professional opportunities for Rust, particularly in Sydney (where I live). I considered moving to the US for the higher salaries and access to Rust roles but recently landed a role here.

    by apatheticonion
  • Interesting perspective. I toyed with rust a bit from the perspective of a c# background (and a bit of java, php, classic asp, JavaScript, typescript, etc) .

    I like rust, but I've come to still prefer c#'s object oriented features. Perhaps it's my naivety, but I've found c# AOT compilation to do plenty of trimming and startup performance optimization that I don't see it as a bad option.

    Have you made a personal comparison on Rust vs Object Oriented Languages like c#?

    by ThunderSizzle
  • If wasm worked is a pretty big caveat still. DOM APIs are still significantly slower in rust using wasm than pure js last I checked.
    by drzaiusx11

  •     > From the perspective of high level application development, I can't see a technical use case for a language other than Rust these days.
    What is wrong with C# and WinForms/WPF? It is an excellent platform to write enterprise desktop apps. Also, developer efficiency is way higher in C# compared to Rust. The language is much simpler, and the VM supports garbage collection. Again: For enterprise apps this is a big win.
    by throwaway2037
  • > From the perspective of high level application development, I can't see a technical use case for a language other than Rust.

    Bit of a red flag if you really can't.

    by strix_varius
  • So when will we get tier 1 debugging support in Visual Studio?
    by ComputerGuru
  • u dont debug rust mate if it compiles it works
    by thrwaway73637
  • RustRover, my friend.
    by dethswatch
  • Works already in Visual Studio Code, even seamlessly between C++ and Rust
    by uncle_kostya
  • I'd also love to see MS sponsoring Windows support for a modern linker like mold or wild.
    by mrec
  • println!() already works, who needs more than that?

    Kidding aside, VS Code has excellent debugging support already. Unless you need to share your Rust code base with a legacy C/C++ code base, I don't think VS is the best environment for Rust programming.

    There are good use cases for staying within full-fat VS's capability set (drivers, among other things), but I don't think Microsoft needs to add Rust to VS in this much of a hurry.

    by jeroenhd
  • You have it already on VSCode, which isn't quite the same, however nowadays it is an open question which one is more relevant for Microsoft's management, especially given that VS isn't cross platform (see Azure), and is stuck with WPF/.NET Framework.
    by pjmlp
  • Optimistic to assume that modern day programmers even know what a debugger is, or if they do, consider it as anything else than some weird ancient shibboleth only used by the greybeards ;)
    by flohofwoe
  • IDK about "tier 1" but I'll note I've used VS for debugging and profiling Rust binaries. I even wrote a tool to auto-generate a wrapper .sln so I can easily launch from VS: https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/cargo-vs

    The main pain point IME was poor debugger visualizers for standard containers and enums. I fixed some of that for the standard containers by writing some natvis files for std: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues?q=state%3Aclosed%20... . Admittedly, they broke a few times. They also weren't automatically included in the pdbs, so I wrote a crate for that: https://github.com/MaulingMonkey/natvis-pdbs . And then someone crated and stabilized #[debugger_visualizer] for rust itself, which can do the same job: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/attributes/debugger.html .

    (...I should check on enum visualization, but I suspect it's still poor.)

    by MaulingMonkey
  • From the linked Zulip thread (https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/131828-t-com...):

    > We are running different workloads including rustc perf suite. In general the runtime performance is on par with llvm.

    Not what I would've expected!

    by e4m2
  • If it is a tier-1 language why isn't it supported in Visual Studio?
    by petilon
  • It is, with extensions (using rust-analyzer of course). I don't know what's the status inside Microsoft.
    by afdbcreid
  • Because it is already supported in VS Code.

    I don't think this is a hot take, but I'm predicting Microsoft will gradually phase out Visual Studio in favor of VS Code.

    by cwbrandsma
  • It's only tier-1 for internal Microsoft use.

    And for all we know, it might be officially supported in their internal builds of Visual Studio.

    by phire
  • Microsoft doesn’t use Visual Studio internally for many of its products such as Windows.
    by sedatk
  • Given how long it took visual studio to get 64bit support, I wouldn't hold your breath!

    ( Edit: I should probably inform the layperson: It was Visual Studio 2022 )

    by eterm