Rust and Haskell

The unifying ideas behind Rust and Haskell

It has been a couple of years a go that I’ve been trying to wrap my head around Haskell. Looking back at this time from my current point of view I realize that I really didn’t grasp many of the concepts behind the language. It wasn’t actually the logic of the language itself, but the deeper meaning of why the things are done that way. In my defense: Haskell is not the easieset language out there to learn. It is very academic and for people that want to get going fast probably tiresome. I finished the Beginner’s Track of the Haskell wikibook, tinkered a little bit with Monads, but somehow couldn’t get really warm with the language. After a while other stuff went into focus and basically abandoned the language. But I always had it in mind as “kind a cool and worth coming back to at some point in the future”.

Cut - We jump a few years ahead.

I was already pretty comfortable with the Python programming language and start to dig around in the online community. One day I found Armin Ronacher's blog and started to read his posts. He’s a smart guy and I really like the stuff that the pocoo team is doing (Armin is part of that team). It was in one of his blog posts that I first read about Rust. He found some good words for the language and that got me interested. I read quite a bit documentation: the Rust book, papers and other online resources. I liked the concepts, but one the other hand the type system also scared me a bit. Again, as with Haskell, I played around but didn’t really achieve anything big with the language. As with Haskell, I couldn’t really motivate myself to start a bigger project and these languages are also not seen a lot in business environments. Eventually my Rust adventure came to an end as well.

Cut again - We now have sometime earlier this year.

I decided to give Rust another go. I started to cross-read the official online book again. This time I set myself a clear goal: choose a project and do it. This went well and I’ll come back at that on a different blog post. The thing is that once again my mind had grown since the last time I tried to learn Rust. It is really funny how you see things with totally different eyes with one year time difference. I often gain that insight that I didn’t understand things very well back in the past. Like with almost everything in life - context matters.

I had one of these epiphanies when looking the second time at Rust. Not only was it all clearer now, I could really see common patterns. Rust is such an interesting alternative for me because it unifies many of my other programming interests. Firstly the languages that influenced Rust. Obviously C (C++ not so much I guess), but also Python (e.g. Rust’s string formatting documentation explicitly mentions Python) and Haskell. I am even brave enough to state:

Rust is the imperative version of Haskell

The reason why I say this is how similar Rust and Haskell are regarding how their type system works, how they handle object orientation and how they enforce error handling. A few examples:

1. Rust has the Option type, which is exactly Haskell’s Maybe type
2. Rust has the Error type, which is Haskell’s Either equivalent
3. Both languages have type classes. There exists a separation between an object’s interface and the data it holds. Objects can be a member of many type classes and every type class membership (“the object instantiates the type class”) is a promise that the object supports a certain interface. Rust calls them traits and I think that is a really good name, because if an object implements (impl in Rust) a trait it is like a change of character.
4. Both languges make heavy use of pattern matching and unwrapping.

To make it short: Discovering these similarities reanimated my interest and love for both languages. One thing though I think Rust made better than Haskell is to answer the question “Why do we want to deal with this super strict type system?”. The answer: It avoids stupid mistakes and reduces unexpected program behaviour. At the beginning this system feels for the unexperienced programmer like driving against a wall with a car. I remember how lost I was to even get the simplest main functions to compile. But after a while these types start to feel like an extra safety net. You start to trust them and they start to be the torch in the pitch-black night.