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I should first tell that I don't hate rust. It is a well designed language for what it aims for (statically guaranteed memory safety for systems programming). I

I should first tell that I don't hate rust. It is a well designed language for what it aims for (statically guaranteed memory safety for systems programming). I have deep respect for rust creator and some members of core team for their technical work. What irritates me is claims like "If borrow checker rejects your code, it was wrongly structured anyway" and "rust's restrictions lead to good structured code". It is not wrong if program logic requires self referential structures, for example. Neither does it make sense to evangelize rust using blanket statements like this. I get the impression that some people are trying to evangelize rust as a language for everything. The mental overhead of rust (or maybe ATS, maybe Ada/SPARK, depending on requirements) makes sense for systems programming, where C/C++ will make stuff even more complicated, and you can't compromise on performance. The applications domain is realistically better served by something like F# / OCaml / Go once it gets generics..

fluffything 6y ago
> "If borrow checker rejects your code, it was wrongly structured anyway" Nobody is claiming that? At least not in this thread. I think your confusion stems for thinking that "Rust == borrow checker". The borrow checker is a tiny part of Rust. > The mental overhead of rust I find the mental overhead of Rust to be smaller than that of Python, Go, Java, Haskell, C, C++, Lisp, and pretty much any other language that I've ever used. In Rust I don't have to think about multi-threading, data-races, memory management, resource acquisition and release... the compiler does the thinking for me. I also can refactor and reshuffle code at will, and trust the compiler to catch all errors. Changing a type that pretty much every translation uses in a 500k LOC code base and add multi-threading to it? No problem, just try it out, and if it compiles, it is correct. I can't say the same of Go, Python, Java, etc. where threading errors are impossible to debug. And well, it wouldn't even be worth trying. It would be impossible to make sure that the code is correct, even after fuzzing for weeks.

fluffything 6y ago

> "If borrow checker rejects your code, it was wrongly structured anyway" Nobody is claiming that? At least not in this thread. I think your confusion stems for thinking that "Rust == borrow checker". The borrow checker is a tiny part of Rust. > The mental overhead of rust I find the mental overhead of Rust to be smaller than that of Python, Go, Java, Haskell, C, C++, Lisp, and pretty much any other language that I've ever used. In Rust I don't have to think about multi-threading, data-races, memory management, resource acquisition and release... the compiler does the thinking for me. I also can refactor and reshuffle code at will, and trust the compiler to catch all errors. Changing a type that pretty much every translation uses in a 500k LOC code base and add multi-threading to it? No problem, just try it out, and if it compiles, it is correct. I can't say the same of Go, Python, Java, etc. where threading errors are impossible to debug. And well, it wouldn't even be worth trying. It would be impossible to make sure that the code is correct, even after fuzzing for weeks.