Rust is hard in that it gives you a ton of rope to hang yourself with, and some people are just hell bent on hanging themselves.
I find Rust quite easy most of the time. I enjoy the hell out of it and generally write Rust not too different than i'd have written my Go programs (i use less channels in Rust though). But i do think my comment about rope is true. Some people just can't seem to help themselves.
That seems like an odd characterization of Rust. The borrow checker and all the other type safety features,
as well as features like send/sync are all about not giving you rope to hang yourself with.
The rope in my example is complexity. Ie choosing to use "all teh features" when you don't need or perhaps even want to. Eg sometimes a simple clone is fine. Sometimes you don't need to opt for every generic and performance minded feature Rust offers - which are numerous.
Though, i think my statement is missing something. I moved from Go to Rust because i found that Rust gave me better tooling to encapsulate and reuse logic. Eg Iterators are more complex under the hood, but my observed complexity was lower in Rust compared to Go by way of better, more generalized code reuse. So in this example i actually found Go to be more complex.
So maybe a more elaborated phrase would be something like Rust gives you more visible rope to hang yourself with.. but that doesn't sound as nice. I still like my original phrase heh.
I would love to see a language that is to C what Rust is to C++. Something a more average human brain like mine can understand. Keep the no-gc memory safety things, but simplify everything else a thousand times.
Not saying that should replace Rust. Both could exist side by side like C and C++.
I feel like it is the opposite, Go gives you a ton of rope to hang yourself with and hopefully you will notice that you did: error handing is essentially optional, there are no sum types and no exhaustiveness checks, the stdlib does things like assume filepaths are valid strings, if you forget to assign something it just becomes zero regardless of whether it’s semantically reasonable for your program to do that, no nullability checking enforcement for pointers, etc.
Rust OTOH is obsessively precise about enforcing these sort of things.
Of course Rust has a lot of features and compiles slower.
> the stdlib does things like assume filepaths are valid strings
A Go string is just an array of bytes.
The rest is true enough, but Rust doesn't offer just the bare minimum features to cover those weaknesses, it offers 10x the complexity. Is that worth it?
What do people generally write in Rust? I've tried it a couple of times but I keep running up against the "immutable variable" problem, and I don't really understand why they're a thing.
I don't really get immutable variables, or why you'd want to make copies of things so now you've got an updated variable and an out-of-date variable. Isn't that just asking for bugs?
As with many things, it comes down to tradeoffs. Immutable variables have one set of characteristics/benefits/drawbacks, and mutable variables have another. Different people will prefer one over the other, different scenarios will favor one over the other, and that's expected.
That being said, off the top of my head I think immutability is typically seen to have two primary benefits:
- No "spooky action at a distance" is probably the biggest draw. Immutability means no surprises due to something else you didn't expect mutating something out from under you. This is particularly relevant in larger codebases/teams and when sharing stuff in concurrent/parallel code.
- Potential performance benefits. Immutable objects can be shared freely. Safe subviews are cheap to make. You can skip making defensive copies. There are some interesting data structures which rely on their elements being immutable (e.g., persistent data structures). Lazy evaluation is more feasible. So on and so forth.
Rust is far from the first language to encourage immutability to the extent it does - making immutable objects has been a recommendation in Java for over two decades at this point, for example, to say nothing of its use of immutable strings from the start, and functional programming languages have been working with it even longer. Rust also has one nice thing as well which helps address this concern:
> or why you'd want to make copies of things so now you've got an updated variable and an out-of-date variable
The best way to avoid this in Rust (and other languages with similarly capable type systems) is to take advantage of how Rust's move semantics work to make the old value inaccessible after it's consumed. This completely eliminates the possibility that the old values anre accidentally used. Lints that catch unused values provide additional guardrails.
Obviously this isn't a universally applicable technique, but it's a nice tool in the toolbox.
In the end, though, it's a tradeoff, as I said. It's still possible to accidentally use old values, but the Rust devs (and the community in general, I think) seem to have concluded that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, especially since immutability is just a default rather than a hard rule.
I find Rust quite easy most of the time. I enjoy the hell out of it and generally write Rust not too different than i'd have written my Go programs (i use less channels in Rust though). But i do think my comment about rope is true. Some people just can't seem to help themselves.