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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

Reading this I realize that I know nothing about Rust's type system, despite using the language daily.

When I use Rust, I feel like I'm just a dude mopping the floors of the nuclear silo.

Imagine doing C++. It's like being the new guy who has to manually take Geiger readings of the warhead.

Basic modern C++ is easier than Rust at this point. It’s not as safe (std::shared_ptr is not your friend), but it’s easier to get going vs dealing with lifetimes and Rustic syntax. I feel like at this point Rust has inherited all the syntax diarrhea of C++ and makes me adverse to using it. I don’t want to wrestle type system crap when I’m trying to wrestle app features. Some things I love. A few things I hate. Those things I hate make me use another language. A lot of rust is inferred through use so why bother with the extra cognitive load of having to unwrap or box or ‘a or worse ‘static. Zig isn’t better in this area either, requiring allocators for everything. Go is great but it’s a bit too simple and not fast enough for Rust-like workloads. This is me with a sad face because while I applaud the effort to build modern languages and tooling, we still haven’t addressed the issue of syntax elitism and shame-by-code-review because someone didn’t know about macro meta. I just want to code, have my program work, and not have to master 4th-degree black belt syntax grammar to do it. I think any language or runtime that allows one to write 4th-degree black belt syntax grammar should be shunned for simpler terms. Imagine the quality of software we would produce with a simpler type system. This was the goal of Go but it still needs work on language features for me (I really really want operator overloading on structs using + - * and / instead of methods).

C++ is by far the most Wild West, the most gotcha, the most “do as I say but not as I do”, the most “yes, except if” language ever. From 98-today, it’s just gotten more and more bloated with alternative pathways and acid pits.

I’m hopeful for Rust. Equally so for Zig. My opinions mean shit and in the end, the Rust team will evolve Rust beyond what they originally intended, capturing dev attention and pushing Rustic concepts outwards. Such as they all have the last 15 years.

> It’s not as safe (std::shared_ptr is not your friend), but it’s easier to get going vs dealing with lifetimes and Rustic syntax.

Rust can be easy enough to get going if you know to use .clone(), Rc<RefCell<>> and the like. Yes it's a bit heavy on boilerplate but that's about it. Also the boilerplate is helpful since it can guide a refactoring effort to make the code a bit more efficient. With Rust, "clean" code is usually fast and safe code which is not as true in other languages.

Less divergent code does not make better code. Rc<RefCell<>> is a prime example of "Do as we say, not as we do" in Rust that has made its way in from C++. I thought the borrow-checker was gospel and yet, here we are on the cusp of circumventing that with dynamic memory allocation checking (or lack thereof, just that it's the same size).

Rust has always supported some variety of Rc<…> because the borrow checker cannot account for every possible way of writing safe code. It's not something that has "made its way in" from the outside, it's just as inherent to the language as anything else in it.

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