3 ms·
I understand your anxiety on the complexity of Rust. I wonder if there were a language that fixes exactly the pitfalls of C (e.g. sane string manipulation), wit
by barosl 11y ago
I understand your anxiety on the complexity of Rust. I wonder if there were a language that fixes exactly the pitfalls of C (e.g. sane string manipulation), without adding any high level concepts, but with memory safety.
However, at the same time I think the language researchers cannot help but add abstractions on today's languages. The unusual exception was Go, but it failed to target the same niche as C/C++ at the end. Actually I think there are more people who like abstractions than those who like the extreme simplicity of C. So unfortunately, a "direct" replacement of C will not happen in the foreseeable future, I think.
- Animats 11y agoIt's not bad that the language has those features. It's that their use is so deeply embedded in the libraries that all Rust users must understand them to do anything. It's a big jump in abstraction for C programmers.
- barosl 11y agoIndeed! That's why I'm still not used to Haskell. While I can do simple things with the language, the abstractions made by the popular libraries written in Haskell require me to understand a certain concept to use them properly. However, while the feature complexity can be avoided at least in the standard libraries, I think that's a more general (possibly cultural) problem, considering a Rust developer will have to use any libraries other than the standard libraries at the end. I believe that's why the Go designers are so wary of adding new features to the language. If there's a feature, library writers will use that feature. Nothing can prevent this.