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I don't know anything about Rust itself but I find it amusing that the author thought that six months should have been more than enough time for the community t

I don't know anything about Rust itself but I find it amusing that the author thought that six months should have been more than enough time for the community to agree on and implement a nontrivial change in how the language works.

stouset 10y ago
Exactly. If you read that thread you can see there's careful and ongoing technical discussion of the details necessary to implement the feature. It hasn't languished, it's not just a bunch of +1s met with developer silence. What precisely is the author expecting the Rust team to do better on here?
- __s 10y ago
  He expects them to say "fuck it, we'll do it live"
Agathos 10y ago
When I saw "at least since March 2016," I wondered if it was a typo.
Lazare 10y ago
Yeah. As a non-Rust developer I was reading the post with some interest and a little sympathy until I saw his timeline. "Right, so they've been working on this potential change since 2016, and...wait. 2016?!" If he'd said 2014 or earlier, I'd consider him to have a point. 2015 is asking for a bit too much, but I can still see his frustration; I'd call that a wash. But 2016? It destroyed his credibility with me, because it's clear he has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to developing a programming language. I know that sounds harsh but...man. He's leaving Rust because they're taking more than six months to implement a massive change to a core language mechanic? Have fun working with absolutely any other language ever.
- indolering 10y ago
  Yeah, most of criticisms I've seen of Rust (ergonomic issues, benchmarks, compile time, even integer overflow) will be dealt with in time. 1.0 means that Rust is stable but lacking features.
- andars 10y ago
  > Traits as a concept have been part of the language for numerous years. It's currently September 2016. Reads to me like he is disappointed that they didn't start the process sooner and have just recently started to discuss a solution.
chaostheory 10y ago
Overall it's a great post detailing one of Rust's issues by the author, but this got me as well > Rust's ecosystem, since Rust itself is reasonably young, is still in a developing stage. > What I didn't know though, was that when you hit a road-block, finding a solution feels like navigating a jungle. Living on the edge always has a price
xuejie 10y ago
While I do agree that six month is not quite long, there's another issue: in the RFC PR, most of discussions took place before Mar 27, which is 10 days after when the RFC was submitted. Then there were a few comments on on Apr 28, and nothing really happened until Aug 4, when someone mentioned they were interested in the RFC, and there only has been minor discussions after that compared to the situation before Mar 27. I might be wrong but judging from this, I felt like we might never reach a conclusion on this topic even in a considerably long enough time, since it did seem to me that the core team is not interested in this feature. From this point of view, I don't think it matters too much when we debate if six month is long enough, even if we waited longer, I'm not sure if the situation is gonna change when interest in this feature stays low.
- steveklabnik 10y ago
  > it did seem to me that the core team is not interested in this feature. It was proposed by a core team member, even. Changing a language takes time. There's only so many people and so much work to do: the author of that RFC has also been working really hard on incremental recompilation, for example, which a lot of people have been waiting for. To re-phrase someone from the Reddit, you can't win: if we don't add new features but fix bugs, people claim that you ignore feature work, but if you add tons of new features, people wonder why you're bothering to add new features when there's lots of bugs open. It's tough.
exadeci 10y ago
Add to that, that the author is an Electrical Engineer. Not that it's a bad thing but if he does programming as a hobby it means that he only used it a few hours a day for 6 months. I don't quite understand why HackerNews gave so much importance to some random developer opinion on Rust.

stouset 10y ago

Exactly. If you read that thread you can see there's careful and ongoing technical discussion of the details necessary to implement the feature. It hasn't languished, it's not just a bunch of +1s met with developer silence. What precisely is the author expecting the Rust team to do better on here?

__s 10y ago
He expects them to say "fuck it, we'll do it live"

Agathos 10y ago

When I saw "at least since March 2016," I wondered if it was a typo.

Lazare 10y ago

Yeah. As a non-Rust developer I was reading the post with some interest and a little sympathy until I saw his timeline. "Right, so they've been working on this potential change since 2016, and...wait. 2016?!" If he'd said 2014 or earlier, I'd consider him to have a point. 2015 is asking for a bit too much, but I can still see his frustration; I'd call that a wash. But 2016? It destroyed his credibility with me, because it's clear he has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to developing a programming language. I know that sounds harsh but...man. He's leaving Rust because they're taking more than six months to implement a massive change to a core language mechanic? Have fun working with absolutely any other language ever.

indolering 10y ago
Yeah, most of criticisms I've seen of Rust (ergonomic issues, benchmarks, compile time, even integer overflow) will be dealt with in time. 1.0 means that Rust is stable but lacking features.
andars 10y ago
> Traits as a concept have been part of the language for numerous years. It's currently September 2016. Reads to me like he is disappointed that they didn't start the process sooner and have just recently started to discuss a solution.

chaostheory 10y ago

Overall it's a great post detailing one of Rust's issues by the author, but this got me as well > Rust's ecosystem, since Rust itself is reasonably young, is still in a developing stage. > What I didn't know though, was that when you hit a road-block, finding a solution feels like navigating a jungle. Living on the edge always has a price

xuejie 10y ago

While I do agree that six month is not quite long, there's another issue: in the RFC PR, most of discussions took place before Mar 27, which is 10 days after when the RFC was submitted. Then there were a few comments on on Apr 28, and nothing really happened until Aug 4, when someone mentioned they were interested in the RFC, and there only has been minor discussions after that compared to the situation before Mar 27. I might be wrong but judging from this, I felt like we might never reach a conclusion on this topic even in a considerably long enough time, since it did seem to me that the core team is not interested in this feature. From this point of view, I don't think it matters too much when we debate if six month is long enough, even if we waited longer, I'm not sure if the situation is gonna change when interest in this feature stays low.

steveklabnik 10y ago
> it did seem to me that the core team is not interested in this feature. It was proposed by a core team member, even. Changing a language takes time. There's only so many people and so much work to do: the author of that RFC has also been working really hard on incremental recompilation, for example, which a lot of people have been waiting for. To re-phrase someone from the Reddit, you can't win: if we don't add new features but fix bugs, people claim that you ignore feature work, but if you add tons of new features, people wonder why you're bothering to add new features when there's lots of bugs open. It's tough.

exadeci 10y ago

Add to that, that the author is an Electrical Engineer. Not that it's a bad thing but if he does programming as a hobby it means that he only used it a few hours a day for 6 months. I don't quite understand why HackerNews gave so much importance to some random developer opinion on Rust.