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Wow. I'm pleasantly surprised that all of my issues are actually being addressed -- I was thinking that I might be in the minority on these points. I need to be

Wow. I'm pleasantly surprised that all of my issues are actually being addressed -- I was thinking that I might be in the minority on these points. I need to be paying closer attention to the mailing list. While I love that you are making major changes, I am sure that you are aware that the instability of the language is a problem for many people. I have been watching from the sidelines for a good while now, but aside from testing new builds and reading the developer blogs, I dare not start using Rust for anything. Niko Matsakis's recent blog entry about mutability was particularly disappointing as it seems such a basic idea should have been settled much earlier. I can appreciate the kind of experimental, agile approach to language design, of course; but while Rust is germinating, I have been forced to fall back to Go. I really hope the dust settles soon so the language can stabilize and mature. As for the semicolons, I think a strict, well-defined rule such as the one used by Go is sufficient. Actually, Go is a bit too rigid about semicolon insertion for my taste. The following, for example, will not compile, despite the fact that the ending brace is expected by the parser: house := &House{ color: Green, floors: 3, patio: true } On the other hand, Go is perfectly happy about: import ( "fmt" "io" ) ...but I have not looked into why this is a special case.

pcwalton 14y ago
The instability of the language is something we've been discussing a lot, but I think it's better to make a good language than to rush something out the door and be living with our mistakes years down the road. That said, we are racing to get the design finalized as quickly as possible. These design discussions would have happened behind closed doors in most other places; the fact that you can see all of it just shows how open our development process is. We deliberately haven't been making much noise about Rust because we know it's unstable. When we are ready to finalize and commit to aspects of the language design, we'll make that clear. Mutability is pretty hard. Consider what C++ and D had to go through with const/immutable correctness. The design we came up with is pretty novel and captures all of our use cases in a simple way, but it wasn't easy to arrive at.
- lobster_johnson 14y ago
  Absolutely, better to have a good language than something rushed. As an aisde, I'm curious if the core design of the language itself has been/is done online, as opposed to working closely in an office environment? In my experience, technical design is something that greatly benefits from being present in the same room as other people. The second you have to sit down and actually write out paragraphs about how you're right about some issue, and debate about it democratically with a group of people, efficiency drops significantly. I guess my hypothesis is that a small team working in a single location could bat out a language faster than a larger distributed team, and that possibly Rust has taken so long partly because it is an example of the latter. > The design we came up with is pretty novel Is this [1]? The roadmap makes it sound like it's up in the air ("one of the larger unknowns") at this point. [1] http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/05/31/mutability/ http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/05/31/muta...

pcwalton 14y ago

The instability of the language is something we've been discussing a lot, but I think it's better to make a good language than to rush something out the door and be living with our mistakes years down the road. That said, we are racing to get the design finalized as quickly as possible. These design discussions would have happened behind closed doors in most other places; the fact that you can see all of it just shows how open our development process is. We deliberately haven't been making much noise about Rust because we know it's unstable. When we are ready to finalize and commit to aspects of the language design, we'll make that clear. Mutability is pretty hard. Consider what C++ and D had to go through with const/immutable correctness. The design we came up with is pretty novel and captures all of our use cases in a simple way, but it wasn't easy to arrive at.

lobster_johnson 14y ago
Absolutely, better to have a good language than something rushed. As an aisde, I'm curious if the core design of the language itself has been/is done online, as opposed to working closely in an office environment? In my experience, technical design is something that greatly benefits from being present in the same room as other people. The second you have to sit down and actually write out paragraphs about how you're right about some issue, and debate about it democratically with a group of people, efficiency drops significantly. I guess my hypothesis is that a small team working in a single location could bat out a language faster than a larger distributed team, and that possibly Rust has taken so long partly because it is an example of the latter. > The design we came up with is pretty novel Is this [1]? The roadmap makes it sound like it's up in the air ("one of the larger unknowns") at this point. [1] http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/05/31/mutability/ http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/05/31/muta...