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Comment by nbittich | Hacker News Reader

Rust is a language built by extremely smart people, unfortunately their focus is more on type theory and sparing few allocations than building something useful and coherent for blue collar devs like me. When I read a blog post on rust, I literally don't understand half of it, although I'm working with rust since 2020.

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Could you share your examples of incoherence in Rust? I actually find it a small, well-designed and very coherent language. At least, when compared to huge mainstream languages. E.g., traits cover the use cases of both "abstract classes" and "concepts" in C++, or both "abstract classes" and "protocols" in Python. And there are no inconsistencies regarding using exceptions or returning errors by value (panics exist, but they are used as assertions). There's no separate ternary operator, which is redundant when you have an if-else expression.

Async vs non async code. It's basically two different languages imho. generics are also a big pain to work with, specially along with lifetimes. I have fun working with rust now that I am good enough at it, but I kept my objectivity in the process of learning it.

> Could you share your examples of incoherence in Rust?

just a nit.

I think they used a narrow definition of coherent, for blue collars, which in web often imply mundane CRUD and agency apps.

I wouldn't expand the discussion to a brother definition about a general incoherency in the language. And certainty wouldn't bring comparisons to C++ when replying to their message.

I guess by "blue collar devs" (as you said, mundane CRUD etc.) they mean devs that will quickly get replaced by AI.

Anything by withoutboats, really.

I think async/sync is a big example as someone else mentioned.

I'd also say the macro systems. Macro by example is a totally new (and let's be honest, awful) language, and the proc macros are another thing again.

Thankfully I find I very very rarely need to actually write macros, and you can avoid async most of the time unless you're doing web dev.

Still a fantastic language - easily the best at the moment IMO, but I see his point.

But Rust is a systems language, for which Rust is excellent. Among its peers, I find C++ blog posts even less coherent.

Despite recent trends to use Rust for everything, it’s not supposed to be used for CRUD apps. I think this blog post is really just a case study in “use the right tool for the job, not necessarily the language you enjoy in your spare time or the latest trend in programming”

Lol it's funny how often I get "but rust is not for making crud", although I never said I was using it for that.

It's funny also because this is basically what you read when you arrive on the landing page of rust: A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

Crud are still software I think

Rust is essentially a C++ replacement. If you can afford a garbage collector, there's no need to use Rust or C++ and worry about memory management. Some people are promoting Rust as a general purpose programming language - which it is in theory - but so did people with C++ in the 90s.

> sparing few allocations

Minimizing memory allocations is typically what you want when you reach for Rust or C++.

Sparing few allocations at the risk of making the language inconsistent is an extremely bad way of building a programming language. If you write async code, rules are not the same than non async code. I am using rust for 4 years, I think I have a good enough level with it and thank God I kept my objectivity. Btw this is at the first page of the rust website, not "c++ replacement" : A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

> Btw this is at the first page of the rust website, not "c++ replacement"

They wish :) Why should anyone - apart from aesthetic preferences - fight the borrow checker and deal with long compile times when they can just use a language with GC? It just doesn't make sense to me from a technical standpoint. You reach for Rust or C++ when you can't use C#, Go or Java.

> If you write async code, rules are not the same than non async code.

The thing is: Rust is (also) catering to people who want to write async code on embedded devices.

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