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> even more importantly by making programmers like the fact that they have to put pervasive annotations into their code That’s the thing: many of us deeply dis
by blub 2y ago
> even more importantly by making programmers like the fact that they have to put pervasive annotations into their code
That’s the thing: many of us deeply dislike the annotations since they slow things down and look ugly.
- sunshowers 2y agoCompletely reasonable.
- dralley 2y agoMany developers dislike doing all sorts of useful things, like writing documentation in general, or tests. Rust is an upfront investment of time which pays back in later stages when you're not spending 10 hours hunting down issues with valgrind or trying to explain codebase-specific lifetime semantics to junior developers. Yes the initial development is "slower", but you can then do massive refactors without fear of breaking some subtle rule that will blow things up, because such rule-breaking would result in a failure to compile.
- blub 2y agoRust is a continuous additional investment of time which will need to happen when writing the code, changing the code, doing the massive refactorings you mention and last but not least when reading the code. There are benefits to that investment, but likely only in specific kinds of software (such as browsers, kernels, etc) which are relentlessly attacked and for specific kinds of programmers that like to specify things in much detail and don’t mind the associated costs. The friction comes from pushing Rust as a generic solution for most programmers. See the Rust in the backend efforts for the perfect example.
- rileymat2 2y agoI must write code very differently than most writing the actual code is not what takes my time. Sure you feel that time, but it ends up being a pretty small percentage of mine.
- dralley 2y agoSo? I feel like that backs up my point. Sure it may slow down development but it encodes useful information for reading and understanding the code later on, and preventing the most pernicious sorts of bugs (data races, UB, memory unsafety) from creeping in in the first place - and thus less need to spend time doing non-development tasks later.
- rileymat2 2y agoYes, I am agreeing. I am saying, a lot of these affordances that enter code faster or terser are not where I spend my time. I spend my time on the things you are talking about.