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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

> I started programming with C a long time ago, and even now, every few months, I dream of going back to those roots. It was so simple. You wrote code, you knew roughly which instructions it translated to, and there you went!

Related-- I'm curious what percentage of Rust newbies "fighting the borrow checker" is due to the compiler being insufficiently sophisticated vs. the newbie not realizing they're trying to get Rust to compile a memory error.

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I certainly spent most (95%+?) of my "fighting the borrow checker" time writing code I would never try to write in C++. A simple example is strings: I'd spend a lot of time trying to get a &str to work instead of a String::clone, where in equivalent C++ code I'd never use std::string_view over std::string - not because it would be a memory error to do so in my code as it stood, but because it'd be nearly impossible to keep it memory safe with code reviews and C++'s limited static analysis tooling.

This was made all the worse by the fact that I frequently, eventually, succeeded in "winning". I would write unnecessary and unprofiled "micro-optimizations" that I was confident were safe and would remain safe in Rust, that I'd never dare try to maintain in C++.

Eventually I mellowed out and started .clone()ing when I would deep copy in C++. Thus ended my fight with the borrow checker.

Not everything can be proved at compile-time, so necessarily Rust is going to complain about things that you know can be done safely in that specific context.

For example some tree structures are famously PITA in Rust. Yes, possible, but PITA nonetheless.

If you come from C to Rust to basically have to rewire your brain. There are some corner cases that are wrong in Rust, but mostly you have to get used to a completely new way of thinking about object lifetimes and references to objects.

...and then you come back to your C code and think 'how could I not think of these things'.

Though one thing that makes Rust quite different from C is move semantics.

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