Agree about the example! I can't tell if this article is tongue-in-cheek or earnest. I'm unclear on the point the author is trying to make.
In other words, be careful what you wish for.
Most people would probably be better served by a language that was a tiny bit slower but had better developer productivity. However, once you deviate from the goal of “as fast as possible”, then you have to choose which parts you want to sacrifice speed for productivity. Like Excel, everybody agrees that Rust is too complicated but nobody can agree on which 10% to remove.
D maybe? D and Rust are the two languages which come to mind when I think about "possible C++ replacements".
There’s also the middle ground of Swift’s memory management which uses compiler-elided refcounting - i.e. the compiler detects when a count goes up then down again and removes those operations.
In the face of threading that's not a safe optimisation; if another thread decrements the refcount inbetween those two removed operations, boom. The compiler will have to track every variable that crosses threads or something.
EDIT: spelling
I don't think most people use Rust because it's fast - fast is nice but Rust is being thrown at a bunch of use cases (e.g. backend services and APIs) for which it replaces "slower" garbage collected languages (the language being faster doesn't always make the overall product/service faster but that's a separate question).
What Rust gives you is a viable potential alternative to C and C++ in places where you absolutely can't have a GC language, and that's a huge deal, the problems and confusion start when people try to use Rust for everything.
> everybody agrees that Rust is too complicated
I don't think this is true either - a large part of the Rust community seem to think that it's as complicated as it needs to be. As a beginner/outsider, I found it kind of cumbersome to get started with, but that's certainly not everyone's opinion.
> Most people would probably be better served by a language that was a tiny bit slower but had better developer productivity.
True, and such languages already exist and are widely used, Rust doesn't need to fit that use case.
Personally I feel it's not complicated enough. Where is my function overloading, variadic templates and usable compile time reflection? (Sure you can sometimes use macros but ew macros)
Indeed. Rust is really crying out for a real CTFE implementation + richer macros to replace the mess that is procmacros (I really don't want to have to run an arbitrary external binary with full system access just to manipulate the AST...)
With any language there’s an active part of the community and then there’s the “dark matter” of people who use the language but are not actively involved in shaping its direction, forums or subreddits, etc.
Of course the people who are actively involved are likely to be of the opinion that all the complexity is necessary, but I doubt that applies to the broader Rust userbase.