3 ms·

I want to know more about why you disklike rustc error messages. I always found them legible, precise and helpful at the same time.

• moonchild 5y ago
  They are exceedingly verbose. The most important part of a compiler error, to me, is location information. Use of colour (and possibly other formatting) to draw the eye directly to the site of the error is valuable. Sometimes this is enough, and the issue immediately becomes obvious. Sometimes it is not. In the case where it is, and there are multiple errors, the proliferation of text obscures the display of code itself. I can scroll, sure; but the human-computer communication channel has high latency, so it is desirable to minimize synchronization overhead and round-trips. In the case where it is not, my main priority is to identify the problem. I don't want to know why some form is problematic, I want to know which problem it is. With terse error messages there's a decent chance I'll memorize them over time, and recognise a given error message all at once by shape, rather than reading them word by word. Just as I memorize words and recognise them all at once, by shape, rather than letter by letter. * * * This conflict of 'why' vs 'which' is didactic. An inexperienced programmer might in fact want to know why their code is not working. But my own experience at this point is that, if it is not presently clear what is wrong with my code, what I need to study is my own code, not the error message.