Comment by xorvoid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xorvoid | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty conflicted on this comment section. A lot of people are expressing a lot of fear of C++ bloat. I get that.

I'm not sure what the right answer for Rust is, but I'm fairly convinced that these type system ideas are the future of programming languages.

Perhaps it can be added to rust in a reasonable and consistent way that doesn't ultimately feel like a kludgy language post-hoc bolt on. Time will tell. There is a serious risk to getting it wrong and making the language simply more complicated for no gain.

But, these ideas are really not obscure academic stuff. This is where programming language design is at. This moment is like talking about sum-types in the 2010s. These days that concept is normalized and expected in modern programming languages. But, that's a fairly recent development.

I suspect that Linear types, refinement types, etc will follow a similar trajectory. Whether new ideas like this can be reasonably added to existing languages in a good way is the age old question.

Hopefully Rust makes good choices on that road.

> There is a serious risk to getting it wrong and making the language simply more complicated for no gain.

I think the Rust team/community is well-aware of this. Which is why Rust has such a well-defined RFC life-cycle.

At the other end, one of the biggest complaints about Rust is that many features seem eternally locked behind nightly feature gates.

I feel the same confliction about this organizational policy. It has been refreshing that they haven't just jammed half-baked ideas into stable like C++ has done for decades. But, yes, it's frustrating to bump into an issue and discover that a fix has been proposed and implemented but has never been moved to stable in 5-10 years. Some things feel like they're languishing in nightly forever.

I don't personally have a solution to propose to this problem. I generally appreciate their caution and long-term considering. It's refreshing coming from C++. I suppose one could argue that they've overcorrected in the other direction. Unclear.

Deeper than that, I think there's a philosophical dispute on whether languages should or shouldn't even evolve. There are people with C-stability type thinking that would argue that long-term stability is so important that we should stop making changes and etch things into stone. There is some merit to that (a lot of unhelpful churn in modern programming). But, failure to modernize is eventually death IMHO. I think C is slowly dying because of exactly this. It will take quite a while because it is critical computing infrastructure. But, few people remain that defend it's viability. The arguments that remain are of the form "we simply don't have a viable replacement yet".

Perhaps you can even take the view that this is the lifecycle of programming languages. They're not supposed to live forever. That could be a reasonable take. But then you really have to confront the problem of code migration from old languages to new languages. That is a very very hard unsolved problem (e.g. see: COBOL).

Language evolution is foundationally a hard problem. And I'm not unhappy with Rust's approach. I think no one has managed to find an ideal approach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com