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I know the Rust team is ideologically opposed to it. It would ease the barrier to entry, as well as making Rust more amenable to shorter programs. It also provi

I know the Rust team is ideologically opposed to it. It would ease the barrier to entry, as well as making Rust more amenable to shorter programs. It also provides more of an elegance, making items no different than expression bindings. Most importantly, it doesn't oppose the opinion that humans should do a computer's work. After all, Rust could always provide a mode to infer then write the type annotation out. Hopefully an IDE will do this.

kibwen 11y ago
Explicit function signatures are a feature that favors correctness over ergonomics. This isn't the first place that Rust makes this tradeoff: immutability itself is entirely useless in Rust except as a means to to aid programmer correctness (to wit: as a result of tracking ownership, Rust could trivially infer immutability based on usage patterns, but when the devs hinted at the idea of removing immutability the community rallied in opposition (the legendary "mutpocalypse")). Furthermore, the forthcoming work on incremental recompilation intends to leverage the fact that function signatures are infallible in order to enable drastically improved incrementalism (no need to even consider recompiling code that calls a function if only the body of the called function changes), and the same fact will be leveraged to enable huge parallelism in incrementally compiled units. Furtherfurthermore, Rust deliberately doesn't employ Hindley-Milner and so I'm not even 100% certain that whole-program type inference is feasible.