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Dumb question from a curious Clojure guy : how terse is Rust codebase for non-trivial cases?

• speed_spread 6y ago
  It can be quite terse for a typed imperative language. Macros help a lot with boilerplate. Type inference also helps a lot but is standard in most imperative languages nowadays, so I wouldn't count it as a terseness advantage anymore. Also, Rust doesn't go full Hindley-Milner as types still have to be declared in function signatures, by design, for readability. Generics are interesting and can save some typing when doing "blanket implementation" of traits, but overall still will count as stuff you wouldn't have to deal with in a more dynamic language. The remaining sore point are the lifetimes annotations. Although most are elided by the compiler by now, if you fall into a pattern where you have to explicitly carry lifetimes around, things get tiresome real quick. At that point, I usually take it as a sign that my code is not as optimal as it could be, and try to rewrite in a way that's less verbose. This is very much compiler-centric approach and actually reflects the whole Rust experience where programming is akin to having a dialectic conversation with rustc, which although quite smart can also be very pragmatic in its ways.