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Comment by stefncb | Hacker News Reader

My personal issue with Rust isn't the borrow checker. I actually find it quite intuitive. What I don't like is the extreme complexity of everything. There's just so much... stuff.

What I want is a Rust, but with almost everything stripped away. Complexity similar to Go.

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It's worth pointing out that if you say "Go except with Rust's guarantees for thread safety", a _lot_ of the complexity comes back. You need to pull in lifetimes and move semantics and the no-mutable-aliasing rule. You need the Send and Sync traits. You probably want Deref-based smart pointers too. (And you'd need to make extensive use of the new generics features that are already in Go.)

That's not what I'm saying. I want rust, but with the simplicity of go. I want a compiler that's super portable and it itself compiles in a few minutes. I want a straightforward build system that doesn't leave me confused. I want less language features.

I also want a more lightweight syntax but beggars can't be choosers.

You can only add so many constraints to a problem until it becomes unsolvable.

It's like saying "I would like to have a non-volatile storage device that is as long-lasting as microfilm, as fast as an SSD and as cheap as a HDD." At some point, you have to renege on at least one of your constraints.

Fair point, but I don't think my constraints are _that_ extreme. I think it's doable, but we'll never know unless someone seriously attempts it.

What language features would you like to take away from Rust?

I just use Go (or Nim) for native. It’s not comparable in goals and what Rust tries to do at all. But Go compiles super fast, is very fast, solves the glaring C safety issues, very keen on helping you with threads, and has a very fast garbage collector. If I run into performance problems, it’s not because of Go. But yeah Rust has its place in certain scenarios. I still hesitate to call it general purpose though — I think it’s best suited for stuff that underpins applications/usermode. And I don’t think it can be made much less obnoxious.

Go is fast, cgo is slow. Cgo is also annoying to set up on windows. It kills the simplicity of a simple go build.

I would be quite impressed if there was a way to have Rust with "less stuff". It's not like there is a lot stuff that can be removed without making the language quite useless.

nim comes the closest of anything I've found, the infrastructure just isn't quite there.

ocaml has potential but I strongly dislike the numeric operators, and I'm not a huge fan of the syntax in general.

OCaml with python like syntax would be damn near perfect. I could even overlook the operator thing.

Memory management is hard. Thread safety is hard. Go (and Java, Python, …) pushes the complexity of the former to a GC, which has its own drawbacks. Few popular languages actually tackle the latter - most languages have safety problems there such as race conditions (in Go, Python, Java, etc.)

This is not to deny that Rust also has other sources of complexity. But, most of Rust’s complexity can be traced to its fundamental goals of safety and performance. If you’re willing to sacrifice one of those, there are much simpler and easier languages to use.

so you want Go then?

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