I'd assert that the "periodic table of types"[^1] radically overstates the complexity of the Rust type system, largely because of the rampant misuse of the "per

I'd assert that the "periodic table of types"[^1] radically overstates the complexity of the Rust type system, largely because of the rampant misuse of the "periodic table" as a means of presenting groups of things. A "periodic table" of (for example) food items or Perl operators tends to have a bunch of distinct elements in its cells arranged by loose groupings[^2], whereas the Rust periodic table (like the periodic table of elements, but unlike other pop-culture periodic tables) has cells whose contents are for the most part[^3] a function of their row and column. Tabular nomenclature aside: Rust has values and two kinds of pointers, and a handful of built-in types, and you can have pointers to those types. While the semantics of the pointers are unusual, I don't think that makes it that much more complicated. It should also be noted that many of the proposed language changes make said table even more regular (e.g. replacing the [T] syntactic sugar for vectors with a more conventional Vec<T>.) Rust is in some ways complicated, and I'll grant that a beginner to the language will likely curse the borrow-checker more than a few times. But I don't think Rust is nearly as complicated as it is sometimes reputed to be. [^1]: http://cosmic.mearie.org/2014/01/periodic-table-of-rust-types/ http://cosmic.mearie.org/2014/01/periodic-table-of-rust-type... [^2]: http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/periodic/ http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/periodic/ is an egregious example. [^3]: There are exceptions (e.g. the closure types) but they are few and easily memorized.