5 ms·

I like to think that how much time a language makes you spend designing the API is a spectrum, and Rust in particular is very much towards the extreme. There ar

• pasabagi 6y ago
  I don't consider myself a particularly good programmer, and I don't find the burrow checker is a substantial source of cognitive load. I think I get way more friction from: - library authors that go crazy with generics. - the million ways rust makes performance tradeoffs explicit (even when you're writing part of the program where performance simply doesn't matter). - the million-and-one things you can do with an option type. - the arcane macro syntax. I could probably go on. I've been writing a lot of rust because I wanted a low-ish level language with good C interop, and I didn't want to learn C++, so I wasn't at any point a rust fanboy. I very much appreciate not having to be a genius to avoid segmentation faults, but other than that, I think rust is a somewhat ugly language - for the simple reason that it has a lot of features, some of which partially overlap, and most of which are vaguely inconsistent. I'm probably sounding a bit harsher than I mean to - obviously, you can't expect a language like rust to have the simplicity and consistency of something like lua, and by and large, it's better than anything else I write programs in. Still, the point is, as somebody with a lot of (fair and unfair) complaints, the burrow checker is not one of them. It complains rarely, and when it does you're almost always doing something stupid, unless you're doing something fairly arcane, in which case, you should probably use unsafe.
  • bcrosby95 6y ago
    Then you're a good programmer. Rust effectively forces you to code like you're writing a multi-threaded app even when you aren't. There's a reason why people suck at writing multi-threaded apps: because it's hard. This is what people are fighting when they fight the borrow checker. And this is why so many people find it frustrating. There's all sorts of designs that flat out don't work or are way more effort than they're worth.
    • jolux 6y ago
      it's not just about multi-threading, it's also about actually dealing with memory in a way that's safe in a single thread as well without introducing GC, which we know from C is hard too
      • bcrosby95 6y ago
        In my experience most of the painful difficulties people have with the borrow checker is because it works like a read-write lock. AFAIK this aspect isn't required to have safe single threaded code without a GC.
        • bitwize 6y ago
          It is if you want to have automatic deallocation with a strict guarantee of memory safety including no use-after-free bugs.
          • bcrosby95 6y ago
            How does this relate to whether or not you plan to mutate things? Wouldn't plain ole counting work for this, regardless of whether or not they're mutable, rather than what Rust does - allowing multiple readers and no writers, or zero readers and 1 writer?
            • erik_seaberg 6y ago
              Refcounting is GC; it automatically detects at runtime that an object has no references. It also adds a substantial cost that Rust is trying to avoid, often by copying immutable objects (which have better cache locality than random access to refcounts everywhere).
              • bcrosby95 6y ago
                I'm not talking about GC. I'm talking about Rust references: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-02-references-and-borrowing.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-02-references-and-borrow... > At any given time, you can have either one mutable reference or any number of immutable references.
  • slimsag 6y ago
    This is exactly the same thing I can relate to coming from a Go background trying to use Rust.
• munificent 6y ago
  Instead of a spectrum, I think of it more qualitatively. Rust says that lifetime is a fundamental, necessary part of an API's design. To call an API, you have to think about the ownership of what you send to it and what you receive. C also makes you think about ownership in your API design, it's just the language doesn't give you any real tools to express or enforce it. C++ gives you a bunch of tools and options, but you have to hope that you and the API you want to use agreed on which subset of the tools to use. Garbage collected languages specifically take memory management out of the API design by declaring that the runtime will take care of it for everyone. If you want lifetime to be something an API can control, then I think Rust's approach makes sense even though it obviously adds complexity. If you don't, then, yes, removing it from the equation definitely lowers the API design burden. In many ways its analogous to having language support for strings. In C/C++, you gotta hope that the library you're using has the same approach to strings that you want (std::string? char*, wchar_t?, something else?). In newer languages, it's just a given. (For better or worse: because then you end up stuck with UTF-16 in some languages.)
• kenhwang 6y ago
  I've always said if you can write Ruby/Scala, you can probably write simple Rust with very similar levels of productivity after you get past the initial learning curve. But apparently there's a sizable population that thinks Ruby/Scala is hard/confusing/sizable cognitive load too.