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Comment by gnode | Hacker News Reader

I would describe Rust as, for the most part, a very high-level language, with a strong penchant for zero-cost abstractions. I think many people fall into the trap of considering a language with a static type system as low level. Conversely, Rust's generics, traits, operator-overloading, type inference, substructural typing, and type-directed meta-programming are high-level concepts.

Low-level programming is possible in Rust, as it is in many high-level languages, but it is discouraged. Use of "unsafe" is rightfully met with scepticism.

C++ is also a high level language, but does not enforce use of high-level safety abstractions by default. Web programming in C/C++ is possible, and frameworks exist to do it, but memory safety (security) concerns make it undesirable.

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What keeps me from Rust is the documentation of the third party libraries. It’s exactly like Java documentation, Here’s 50 classes with functions with no context good luck and have fun! Meanwhile in Python and JS third party libraries have no choice but to provide great documentation front and center. I’m convinced that if there was some kind of tweaks for Rust to be able to tag small inline tests with comments as front page docs, the language usability would shoot through the moon.

That plus the unfortunate fact that Rust as a language has no specification, so technically speaking, all of Rust is undefined behavior. It's the only thing that holds me back from taking Rust more seriously. I'm enjoying using it on pet projects for now.

Rust has documentation which describes how it's supposed to behave, which is a far cry from everything being undefined behavior. It also has a formal specification of a subset of the language.

It's not like the C/C++ specs are particularly precise. I think people tend to have a mental model of specs as equivalent to formal semantics, which they very much are not.

You should check out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20105996

And I think it’s a bit more subtle than you’re giving credit for.

That wouldn't mean that all of Rust is undefined behavior, it means the compiler is the spec, and the behavior is defined by what the compiler will do. The language having no specification only means that you can't easily determine if what the compiler does is "technically correct", but that's always secondary to the matter of whether the compiler does what you actually want.

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