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I've been toying with Rust on and off for a few years. I find it very difficult to be productive for many of the same reasons that TFA lists. > Finally, imagin

I've been toying with Rust on and off for a few years. I find it very difficult to be productive for many of the same reasons that TFA lists. > Finally, imagine that Rust’s issues dissapear, it is high-level, and has uniform feature set. That would presumably be close to the theoretical ideal of a high-level, general-purpose programming language for the masses. Funnily enough, designing such a language might turn out to be a less intimidating task than original Rust, since we can hide all low-level details under an impenetrable shell of a language runtime. Holy smokes yes. Rust introduces some extremely powerful features that other languages seriously need. Matching on an enum (although Rust's also needs a more traditional enum,) is awesome. Rust's error handling, IMO, is a step in the right direction away from exceptions. I even like the fact that I can enforce single ownership of an object; or have methods that take ownership of an object. And, differentiating between mutable versus immutable without needing different types is infinitely valuable. Furthermore: My favorite feature of Rust is that it's 100% compiled with no need for a framework or runtime.

capableweb 4y ago
Minor correction: Rust does need a runtime (normally), it's just very small and embedded in the binary, so it mostly seems nonexistent, but it's there :) More info: https://prev.rust-lang.org/en-US/faq.html#does-rust-have-a-runtime https://prev.rust-lang.org/en-US/faq.html#does-rust-have-a-r... Not to take away from your overall point, which I agree with.
- gwbas1c 4y ago
  Oh, don't argue semantics. It's not like I have to tell someone to install .Net, Java, Python, ect, in order to run a Rust program. (Or figure out how to bundle it in an installer.) By your logic every language, except for assembly, has a runtime.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    I'm not arguing, just adding some detail to a slightly incorrect fact. It's true that you usually don't have to ask anyone to install anything else to run a Rust program, because the default experience of using Rust + Cargo bundles the runtime for you. But the same can be done with the languages you used as examples as well. Many programs do in-fact include .net, a JVM or a Python runtime so the users don't have to care about it. Biggest example is probably Blender, which ships with Python (and doesn't require a installer). Many IDEs made with Java also ship their own JVM runtimes.

capableweb 4y ago

Minor correction: Rust does need a runtime (normally), it's just very small and embedded in the binary, so it mostly seems nonexistent, but it's there :) More info: https://prev.rust-lang.org/en-US/faq.html#does-rust-have-a-runtime https://prev.rust-lang.org/en-US/faq.html#does-rust-have-a-r... Not to take away from your overall point, which I agree with.

gwbas1c 4y ago
Oh, don't argue semantics. It's not like I have to tell someone to install .Net, Java, Python, ect, in order to run a Rust program. (Or figure out how to bundle it in an installer.) By your logic every language, except for assembly, has a runtime.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I'm not arguing, just adding some detail to a slightly incorrect fact. It's true that you usually don't have to ask anyone to install anything else to run a Rust program, because the default experience of using Rust + Cargo bundles the runtime for you. But the same can be done with the languages you used as examples as well. Many programs do in-fact include .net, a JVM or a Python runtime so the users don't have to care about it. Biggest example is probably Blender, which ships with Python (and doesn't require a installer). Many IDEs made with Java also ship their own JVM runtimes.