Comment by the__alchemist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the__alchemist | Hacker News Reader

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Some of the earlier Rust embedded UIs demonstrate downsides. I like the idea in principle (Letting the compiler catch misconfiguration), but in the implementations I've seen, they don't work well with Rust docs, ie figuring out what types to declare, or how to construct things. My workaround was inserting arbitrary types like `i8` in relevant places and seeing what compiler message is output for the type it was expecting. It can also result in long nests of `<>`.

The typesstate pattern felt hostile when libs using it only included examples of use directly in a main function where you didn't have to specify the type; you'd try to use them in a program in a struct field, function signature etc, and wouldn't know what type to put in.

Example of typestates I've seen: `Spi<SPI1, PA5<Alternate<AF11>>, PA6<Alternate<AF69>...>>>>>>>`

When would be easier to use a plain `Spi` struct.

These aren't necessarily critiques of the typestate pattern in general, but those are the 2 points that pushed me away from it.

It sounds like Rust is in dire need of something similar to C++ decltype.

This feature wouldn't make a lot of sense in most cases in Rust. Rust has full type interference inside functions, so if we're inside the function body we can allow the type to be inferred, partially or entirely. For example Vec<_> says this is a Vec of something but we're not specifying what it's a Vec of.

In the function signature, Rust deliberately doesn't have inference, you must write down the types and decltype would not be acceptable for that purpose.

There’s one thing I can think of that looks like an exception to the lack of interference at function boundaries: you can return impl SomeTrait rather than worrying about the exact thing you’ll return. It’s useful for iterator adapters in particular, where the types depend on the functions you call and in which order, and thus aren’t stable under small modifications to the source code.

(I wouldn’t count impl trait in function parameters since that acts more like a generic type.)

That's not inference, you're literally telling callers "the object I'm giving you might have any type but I promise it implements this Trait".

The compiler knows which concrete type it is, but you needn't and your caller isn't promised it is any particular type (but it is, they just aren't allowed to care)

This is useful because all Rust's functions are types, both lambda and ordinary functions are unique types, but we often want to say I'm going to return say a predicate - we can't name the predicate we're going to return but our caller just wants a predicate so they don't care that we couldn't spell its name.

If doesn't make a lot of sense in most cases in C++ either (and as auto gets better it has only made sense in fewer cases since it was introduced)... I write a lot of C++ and I essentially never ever ever need or even merely use decltype; but, when it does make sense, it really truly makes sense, and here we have a place in Rust that sounds exactly like the use case in C++ where this actually comes up.

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