More FAQs

[brson]

There are still FAQs not answered:

• "What does the name 'Rust' mean?"
• "Why does a tiny program like "Hello World" produce such a large executable file?" - answer.

[antoyo]

The second question is about RAM usage, not executable size.

[brson]

Comparison to swift would be useful.

[Manishearth]

@antoyo Yes, but the additional RAM usage is caused by a larger executable (which is loaded into RAM).

For swift I guess something along the lines of it having a very similar type system without the ownership/borrowing, and using automatic reference counting for memory safety?

[antoyo]

@Manishearth In the thread on rust-lang, I learned that using the system allocator lower the RAM usage. Does this mean that jemalloc is using 10 MB of RAM?

[Manishearth]

That could be the case, but I doubt it; it probably means you're statically linking to jemalloc which increases the binary size (whereas the system allocator exists on your machine anyway)

[brson]

"What's the point of inner attributes?" / "Why are there so many attribute forms?" / "Why are doc comments attributes?"

[petrochenkov]

"Why does my Windows application show console?"

[kud1ing]

"Which string type should i use?"

http://hermanradtke.com/2015/05/03/string-vs-str-in-rust-functions.html

[kud1ing]

"Can i write a function that accepts both &str and String?"

http://hermanradtke.com/2015/05/06/creating-a-rust-function-that-accepts-string-or-str.html

[F001]

Why there is no incremental/decremental operators ( ++/-- ) in Rust?

Well, I know these operators lead to troubles, but I can't find the canonical explanation.

[alilleybrinker]

I am happy to take a crack at answers to the above-listed questions. I can probably whip up reasonable answers to all of them but the naming question. If anyone familiar with the history has a good explanation for the name, I'm happy to write up an answer that explains it.