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Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these things that you mentioned are valid flaws in Rust. I'm not going to dismiss them as not important or non-problems because they are genuine issues. Compile times suck. We could use hot reloading and a REPL. Debugging macros, instrumentation and perf stuff is good, but I assume it could be better. That's what I expect from a language community. Not constant denial about the state of usability. And it really does feel like many of the smaller language communities fall into this hive-mind where type signatures are valid documentation and who needs to use an editor other than emacs?

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They are genuine issues, within Rust, but the way you /categorize/ the severity of the issue is different within language communities. They don't impact usability /much/ because of Rust's community, focus, size and niche.

Compile times in Rust are a problem, but the RLS does a good enough job of feedback and the development loop happens enough in compile time, that users don't miss it enough, compared to, say, Java which relies heavily on runtime behaviour/reflection for application behaviour.

Debugging token macros could be better, such as with a better macro-stepper, but you don't write enough macros in Rust to care heavily about it to make it a big deal, unlike in a Lisp.

Hot reloading would be nice, but not and ~essential~ part of development and deployment like in BEAM. Better reflection utilities might be nice but I doubt Rust libraries will ever be heavily dependent on it in the same way that Go or Java are.

If you are referring to OCaml, many people in the community care a lot about writing good documentation so that it's not just the type signatures. In fact the OCaml website team have made amazing leaps and strides integrating package documentation directly in the website.

And the experience using OCaml LSP Server with VSCode nowadays is honestly pretty good--type annotations displayed, error messages, go to definition, generating interface files. The core functionality is all there.

That's good to hear! I don't mean to be too negative. I'm genuinely glad that OCaml is making these strides. I'm hopeful that OCaml can find its equivalent of Esteban Küber[1] and they can make the language a truly fun and friendly experience.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6X7Ada0ugE

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