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Rust definitely forces you to make more deliberate changes in your design. It took me about 6 months to get past hitting that regularly. Once you do get past it

by joshka 2y ago

Rust definitely forces you to make more deliberate changes in your design. It took me about 6 months to get past hitting that regularly. Once you do get past it, rust is awesome though.

brabel 2y ago
I suppose you haven't had to refactor a large code base yet just because a lifetime has to change?
- merb 2y ago
  actually the higher versions of rust actually do need these refactors way less often since more lifetimes can be elided and when using generic code or impl traits you can basically scrap a ton of it. I still sometimes stumble upon the first example tough but most often it happens because I want to encapsulate everything inside the function instead of doing some work outside of it.
- nostradumbasp 2y ago
  Nope. I have worked professionally for several years on what would now be considered a legacy rust code base. Probably hundreds of thousands of lines, across multiple mission critical applications. Few applications need to juggle lifetimes in a way that is that limiting, maybe a module would need some buffing, but not a major code base change. Most first pass and even refined "in production" code bases I work on do not have deeply intertwined life-times that require immense refactoring to cater to changes. Before someone goes "oh your team writes bad code!", I would say that we had no noteworthy problems with lifetimes and our implementations far surpassed performance of other GC languages in the areas that mattered. The company is successful built by a skeleton crew and the success is owed too an incredibly stable product that scales out really well. I question how many applications truly "need" that much reference juggling in their designs. A couple allocations or reference counted pointers go a really long way to reducing cognitive complexity. We use arenas and whatever else when we need them, but no I've never dealt with this in a way that was an actual terrible issue.

by joshka 2y ago

Rust definitely forces you to make more deliberate changes in your design. It took me about 6 months to get past hitting that regularly. Once you do get past it, rust is awesome though.

brabel 2y ago

I suppose you haven't had to refactor a large code base yet just because a lifetime has to change?

merb 2y ago
actually the higher versions of rust actually do need these refactors way less often since more lifetimes can be elided and when using generic code or impl traits you can basically scrap a ton of it. I still sometimes stumble upon the first example tough but most often it happens because I want to encapsulate everything inside the function instead of doing some work outside of it.
nostradumbasp 2y ago
Nope. I have worked professionally for several years on what would now be considered a legacy rust code base. Probably hundreds of thousands of lines, across multiple mission critical applications. Few applications need to juggle lifetimes in a way that is that limiting, maybe a module would need some buffing, but not a major code base change. Most first pass and even refined "in production" code bases I work on do not have deeply intertwined life-times that require immense refactoring to cater to changes. Before someone goes "oh your team writes bad code!", I would say that we had no noteworthy problems with lifetimes and our implementations far surpassed performance of other GC languages in the areas that mattered. The company is successful built by a skeleton crew and the success is owed too an incredibly stable product that scales out really well. I question how many applications truly "need" that much reference juggling in their designs. A couple allocations or reference counted pointers go a really long way to reducing cognitive complexity. We use arenas and whatever else when we need them, but no I've never dealt with this in a way that was an actual terrible issue.