forked from buzzert/smartbar
30 lines
3.1 KiB
HTML
30 lines
3.1 KiB
HTML
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="assets/css/gtkapplang.css" />
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<div id="body" class="page-base">
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<div id="article-body">
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<h4>Rust (Rating: C+)</h4>
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<p>Of course I cannot go without mentioning the fad language of the decade: <strong>Rust.</strong> I was actually pretty excited to try using Rust to write a GTK app. The users and designers of the language alike are very opinionated, Rust programs are usually very high quality, and I generally like the overall design of the language and the standard library.</p>
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<p>I decided to use the <strong>gtkrs</strong> crate for my Rust app, which was trivial to setup using Rust's excellent build system. From what I can tell, a majority of the code in gtkrs is automatically generated, so there isn't a lot of manual wrapping done, which is quite nice.</p>
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<p>First impressions were very positive. Just like with C++, memory management was straightforward and conventional. I didn't waste a lot of time allocating objects and passing them around the library. The designers of gtkrs did a really good job in creating the bindings while also making them memory safe, which is very much concordant with the Rust philosophy.</p>
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<p>Significantly less boilerplate was required with Rust as well, thanks to macros provided by the <span class="code">glib</span> crate like <span class="code">property</span> and <span class="code">object_subclass</span>. Getter and setter functions are optional and mostly for convenience.</p>
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<p>So why did I give Rust a <strong>C+</strong> rating? The main reason is because Rust is not an object-oriented language. It feels really unnatural to shoehorn object-oriented design patterns into Rust when it was clearly designed not to support that. Of course, it <em>kinda works,</em> and you can finish your app with some pretty nice code to maintain, but it feels sort of like writing classical poetry in LaTeX.</p>
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<p>I finished writing my app in Rust and felt pretty good about it, but to be honest I did have to rewrite large parts of it multiple times. It took me a few tries to figure out how to make the compiler happy while still keeping things "Rusty" if you'll pardon the phrase.</p>
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<h4>Vala (Rating: B)</h4>
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<p>The last language I tried was one I've never heard of before, and probably you haven't either. <strong>Vala</strong> is an object-oriented language that is built by the GNOME team and sits on top of the GLib runtime. It has the standard set of nice-to-have features in modern languages such as async/await, generics, and type inference. It also has a few features that are specifically designed to interact nicely with the GObject runtime, such as signals and properties.</p>
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<p>Another cool thing about Vala is that all of your code gets cross-compiled to decently human-readable C code. So there isn't a lot of worry about cross-platform support, debuggability, or performance, at least compared to C.</p>
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<p>Vala has by far the least amount of boilerplate of all the languages I tried. Because it natively supports properties, your data classes and widget subclasses are extremely minimal and easy to understand.</p>
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</div>
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</div>
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