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> currently can't do better The limitations are an inherent consequence of basic tenets of Rust's design. Rust wouldn't be Rust anymore if you fixed them. > S

by nsajko 3y ago

> currently can't do better The limitations are an inherent consequence of basic tenets of Rust's design. Rust wouldn't be Rust anymore if you fixed them. > Some of the restrictions of the Rust borrow checker and type system are arbitrary. They're there because Rust currently can't do better. They're not the gospel, they aren't necessarily inherent property that must always be satisfied for a program to be bug free. The Rust notion of safety is not an absolute. It's a compromise, and a really annoying, tiresome drain on motivation and productivity sometimes. Yeah, but this actually seems consistent with the philosophy behind Rust: to take away the tools a programmer needs for creativity, so they couldn't do potentially costly mistakes, as applicable to big teams in huge corporations. Another commenter in this thread put it nicely: the borrow checker is a straitjacket for the programmer. It's not meant to foster creativity, it's meant to be safe for big business and novice employees.

Yoric 3y ago
> It's not meant to foster creativity, it's meant to be safe for big business and novice employees. Interestingly, my experience is the opposite. I find that the "straightjacket" is extremely precious during refactorings – in particular, the type of refactorings that I perform constantly when I'm prototyping. Compared to this, I'm currently writing Python code, and every time I attempt a refactoring, I waste considerable amounts of time before I can test the interesting new codepath, because I end up breaking hundreds of other codepaths that get in the way and I need to go through the testsuite (and pray that it contains a sufficient number of tests) hundreds of time until the code is kinda stable. Which is not to say that Rust matches every scenario. We agree that it doesn't, by design. But I don't think that the scenarios you sketch out are the best representation of what Rust can/should be used for and can't/shouldn't be used for.
pjmlp 3y ago
Basically it should be left for scenarios where any kind of automatic memory management isn't allowed, either for technical reasons, or because it is a lost battle trying to change the mindset of the target group. For everything else there are more productive options.

by nsajko 3y ago

Yoric 3y ago

> It's not meant to foster creativity, it's meant to be safe for big business and novice employees. Interestingly, my experience is the opposite. I find that the "straightjacket" is extremely precious during refactorings – in particular, the type of refactorings that I perform constantly when I'm prototyping. Compared to this, I'm currently writing Python code, and every time I attempt a refactoring, I waste considerable amounts of time before I can test the interesting new codepath, because I end up breaking hundreds of other codepaths that get in the way and I need to go through the testsuite (and pray that it contains a sufficient number of tests) hundreds of time until the code is kinda stable. Which is not to say that Rust matches every scenario. We agree that it doesn't, by design. But I don't think that the scenarios you sketch out are the best representation of what Rust can/should be used for and can't/shouldn't be used for.

pjmlp 3y ago

Basically it should be left for scenarios where any kind of automatic memory management isn't allowed, either for technical reasons, or because it is a lost battle trying to change the mindset of the target group. For everything else there are more productive options.