3 ms·

My experience hanging out in r/rust for the last few years is that it’s C, C++, and Java programmers who have the most trouble with the borrow checker. Many C/C

My experience hanging out in r/rust for the last few years is that it’s C, C++, and Java programmers who have the most trouble with the borrow checker. Many C/C++ programmers are used to being able to play fast and loose with pointers, and find the borrow checker restrictive because it won’t let them use the patterns they’re used to using. Java programmers are used to an object oriented style with mutable references to objects all over the place (which you can’t do in Rust). OTOH hand languages like python (and especially JavaScript where pipelines of pure data transformations are already idiomatic) don’t use references much anyway, so use of them is new and doesn’t come with so many expectations.

zarzavat 4y ago
There’s C++ programmers and then there’s C++ programmers. The C++ programmers who have been using std::unique_ptr have absolutely the easiest time learning Rust as Rust is basically C++11 smart pointers on steroids. These C++ programmers usually have the opposite problem, there’s things you are allowed to do in Rust, that you can’t safely do in C++ without copying. Then there are C++ programmers who are still using C++98 style for whatever reason (commonly gamedev) and they don’t benefit from any similarities because their style of C++ is so old that there aren’t any similarities.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > There’s C++ programmers and then there’s C++ programmers. Indeed, there's a subset of C++ (and C) programmers who get Rust almost immediately, because they've effectively been informally using a similar ownership model in their C++ (/C) code already. But there's another subset who write "fast and loose" C++ (/C) on the principle that "it's fine if it works at runtime", and they tend to really struggle.

3 ms·

My experience hanging out in r/rust for the last few years is that it’s C, C++, and Java programmers who have the most trouble with the borrow checker. Many C/C

by nicoburns 4y ago

zarzavat 4y ago
There’s C++ programmers and then there’s C++ programmers. The C++ programmers who have been using std::unique_ptr have absolutely the easiest time learning Rust as Rust is basically C++11 smart pointers on steroids. These C++ programmers usually have the opposite problem, there’s things you are allowed to do in Rust, that you can’t safely do in C++ without copying. Then there are C++ programmers who are still using C++98 style for whatever reason (commonly gamedev) and they don’t benefit from any similarities because their style of C++ is so old that there aren’t any similarities.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > There’s C++ programmers and then there’s C++ programmers. Indeed, there's a subset of C++ (and C) programmers who get Rust almost immediately, because they've effectively been informally using a similar ownership model in their C++ (/C) code already. But there's another subset who write "fast and loose" C++ (/C) on the principle that "it's fine if it works at runtime", and they tend to really struggle.