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I like it in principle, but it can also be really annoying and fussy. A lot of the time with Rust (perhaps because I'm no good, but still) I find myself fiddlin

I like it in principle, but it can also be really annoying and fussy. A lot of the time with Rust (perhaps because I'm no good, but still) I find myself fiddling around with some inane difference between two types I don't really care about (for instance, whether a function pointer is boxed or not). It gets so distracting that I often do the bulk of the work with the linter switched off, just so I can actually think about what I'm doing without having to go down a rabbit hole just so an option is turned into a result in some bit of the code I'm probably going to delete anyway. I think a combination of the explicitness about performance implications, the focus on safety, and the whole lifetime thing leads to Rust being, if not specifically complicated to write, at least extremely fiddly. Which is great if you're in some kind of hot spot where you need all that control and safety. But when you're just trying to add two strings together to make some random error message, it's actually really annoying having the language purposefully complicate things just so you realize there's going to be an allocation. It leads to a really weird distribution of effort, where I spend about half the time on important stuff, and the other half on things that are so trivial and irrelevant to both performance and user experience that I'd be totally happy if they were just all dumped on the heap and cast through void pointers.

atoav 7y ago
I think you probably are just not there yet, Rust defintly has a steep learning curve to it, especially if you are used to other paradigms or patterns than those used in the language. I remember fighting the compiler because I tried to write what I thought of as “beautiful” abstractions, that were basically inspired by my object oriented Python use. Everything and the interaction between everything was a incredibly hard challenge. Until at one point I just gave up and said: “Okay Rust, scrap beautiful code, I’ll just do it your way” and then things started instantly to fall into place. I am not saying that this is where you are at, but it was like that for me. Do I still struggle with types? Sometimes, but rarely and then it is mostly a mix between lack of focus, lazyness and a mistake somewhere else.
- stevekablink 7y ago
  Rust may have a learning curve, but debugging memory errors has an even steeper one.
- pasabagi 7y ago
  I think python is a great example of what I'm talking about, though. I'm not a Python programmer - I've never written anything over a hundred lines in Python, nor sat down to really learn it. However, every time I do something in Python, I'm impressed by how smoothly what I expect to happen actually happens. With Rust, where I've put in a chunk of effort to learn, where I've read books, and have written a substantial amount of code, I'm constantly going back to the documentation to do simple things. The main offender is my inability to remember what traits are implemented by what types. I mean, off the top of your head, is '.binary_search()' a method on &[T] or Vec<T>? Or both? I literally can't remember right now.

atoav 7y ago

I think you probably are just not there yet, Rust defintly has a steep learning curve to it, especially if you are used to other paradigms or patterns than those used in the language. I remember fighting the compiler because I tried to write what I thought of as “beautiful” abstractions, that were basically inspired by my object oriented Python use. Everything and the interaction between everything was a incredibly hard challenge. Until at one point I just gave up and said: “Okay Rust, scrap beautiful code, I’ll just do it your way” and then things started instantly to fall into place. I am not saying that this is where you are at, but it was like that for me. Do I still struggle with types? Sometimes, but rarely and then it is mostly a mix between lack of focus, lazyness and a mistake somewhere else.

stevekablink 7y ago
Rust may have a learning curve, but debugging memory errors has an even steeper one.
pasabagi 7y ago
I think python is a great example of what I'm talking about, though. I'm not a Python programmer - I've never written anything over a hundred lines in Python, nor sat down to really learn it. However, every time I do something in Python, I'm impressed by how smoothly what I expect to happen actually happens. With Rust, where I've put in a chunk of effort to learn, where I've read books, and have written a substantial amount of code, I'm constantly going back to the documentation to do simple things. The main offender is my inability to remember what traits are implemented by what types. I mean, off the top of your head, is '.binary_search()' a method on &[T] or Vec<T>? Or both? I literally can't remember right now.