6 ms·

There is a huge unreadability right there staring at me: What does that Box<> do, and why? Rust is borrowing more and more of the obscurities of C++, and thats

• Munksgaard 7y ago
  Box puts something on the heap and returns a pointer to that thing. Here it is necessary because otherwise the Rust compile wouldn't be able to determine the size (in memory) of a Tree.
  • SamReidHughes 7y ago
    Box<T> is a type, so it’s confusing to say it returns a pointer. It holds a pointer. GP should note that C++’s unique_ptr isn’t an obscurity.
    • HorstG 7y ago
      Calling it Box is confusing. unique_ptr would be an improvement for the name, or maybe HeapRef. The problem is exactly that rust chose a misleading name Box (boxed types are something entirely different in most languages) instead of the obvious C(++)/Java-like _ptr, ref, * or & notation/convention
      • nicoburns 7y ago
        Boxed types in Java are basically the same thing: a heap allocated version of an otherwise stack-allocated type.
      • axelf4 7y ago
        > instead of the obvious C(++)/Java-like _ptr, ref, * or & notation/convention That would be very misleading since Box represents a heap-allocated owned value
      • SamReidHughes 7y ago
        I thought the name was pretty clear; when I saw it in some list of different kinds of Rust pointers, I knew what it was immediately. It doesn't matter if some people are confused, because you can just explain what it is in 3 seconds. What's important for such a ubiquitous type is that the name is short.
• crispinb 7y ago
  There's nothing unreadable (and certainly nothing obscure conceptually) about 'Box<>'. It's just unfamiliar if you don't know Rust. But we'll get nowhere fast confusing readability with familiarity. I'd be interested to know if anyone has done interesting conceptual and/or empirical work on readability. It seems like a very slippery and difficult concept to me. Readable to whom? Readable in the small or the large?
  • HorstG 7y ago
    Readability and familiarity are not the same but closely related. There is nothing inherently more or less readable in the rust or haskell tree example. I think there is work on "readability", just in another context: Its called typography and orthography. And I think the gist of it is: Do it like everybody else does, first and foremost, strange and unfamiliar equals unreadable.
    • crispinb 7y ago
      > I think there is work on "readability", just in another context: Its called typography and orthography. I think that's a very different case. Maybe some analogies might be drawn between some of that work and some of the lower-level aspects of reading code (related to syntax noise etc), but code readability, if it's a defensible concept at all, is a far more complex and layered phenomenon than letter & word recognition. The first thing a researcher would need to establish is whether or not readability even exists as a natural kind apart from familiarity. I don't know the field, so this might already have been pursued somewhere.
  • the_af 7y ago
    > There's nothing unreadable [...] it's just unfamiliar if you don't know Rust Agreed. Note the same applies to Haskell's syntax :) People confuse "readable" with "based in my knowledge of Java and C, I can't make head or tails of this notation without reading a tutorial first", which in my opinion is not a sensible conclusion.
    • crispinb 7y ago