Why is Rust difficult?
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Why is Rust difficult?
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Re: Why is Rust difficult?
#2Good article, although there are also some unforced errors of what Rust community calls "ergonomics" - many of which have been addressed, and hopefully many others will be soon - that make things more difficult to learn than the absolutely have to be. But author is quite correct that some things are just hard, and if a language is being "honest", it must expose them to the user.
Re: Why is Rust difficult?
#3I opened this link expecting someone to complain about the difficulty, verbosity, or other issues commonly mentioned by those learning Rust. I was pleasantly surprised!
I learned Rust by implementing an interpreter for one of my graduate classes. I really enjoyed it, especially their compiler which continues to become even more awesome every day.
If you want to get into systems level programming, or already work at that level, you owe it to yourself to explore this as an option.
Re: Why is Rust difficult?
#4Isn't the problem with Rust that it uses crappy pessimistic heuristics (borrow checker) for essentially NP-C problem, causing complaints where code is perfectly OK? IMO interesting design decision but I am staying away precisely because of this.
Re: Why is Rust difficult?
#5I do think a lot of the difficulty when starting Rust was all about it forcing you to do everything correctly, even when the 'correctness' wasn't needed for how the program was currently being used.
However, my experience learning Rust was that it was pretty easy to work through these things because of how precise the compiler is at describing the issue. I feel like the compiler was my teacher, and it kept on teaching me new concepts to look up in the docs. It was a grind to learn, but not a 'difficult' grind in the sense of getting stuck and banging my head against the same thing for a long time.
Re: Why is Rust difficult?
#6Isn't the problem with Rust that it uses crappy pessimistic heuristics (borrow checker) for essentially NP-C problem, causing complaints where code is perfectly OK? IMO interesting design decision but I am staying away precisely because of this.
Do you stay away from all type systems? This would be an accurate negative framing for any type system, which all necessarily reject some correct programs.
Re: Why is Rust difficult?
#7Good article, although there are also some unforced errors of what Rust community calls "ergonomics" - many of which have been addressed, and hopefully many others will be soon - that make things more difficult to learn than the absolutely have to be. But author is quite correct that some things are just hard, and if a language is being "honest", it must expose them to the user.
I worked on some small learning projects in Rust about 6 months ago. When I got compiler errors related to the borrow checker and concurrency, I found that it was often easiest to look at whatever variable or function the compiler was pointing to, and then ask myself what could possible go wrong that would somehow fall under the purview of the borrow checker, because the actual error messages didn't always point to the root of the problem.
I don't have the specific examples anymore, but I think my errors were caused by things like passing around or trying to mutate references created from a data structure inside an Arc pointer or safety issues relating to unscoped threads. At the time, I felt like those things would have been very difficult to debug from the compiler errors alone if I hadn't had past experience with those same issues in other languages (which is what the article says about needing to learn quite a bit about writing programs correctly)
Re: Why is Rust difficult?
#8Isn't the problem with Rust that it uses crappy pessimistic heuristics (borrow checker) for essentially NP-C problem, causing complaints where code is perfectly OK? IMO interesting design decision but I am staying away precisely because of this.
I think this comes down to philosophy; do you want the compiler to just check that the program works for all the current parts, or to have the compiler make sure that the program will work for all the possible ways the interfaces can be used as described?
Basically, Rust makes you ensure that your code can actually do all the things it says it can do, not just the things it is currently doing. Personally, I find that very helpful; I would rather do the work up front than have to go back and fix a lot of things later as my code grows. This might be based on my experience designing and maintaining very long lived systems, where I wish I had been forced to do things correctly from the beginning.
Re: Why is Rust difficult?
#9Isn't the problem with Rust that it uses crappy pessimistic heuristics (borrow checker) for essentially NP-C problem, causing complaints where code is perfectly OK? IMO interesting design decision but I am staying away precisely because of this.
Do you stay away from all type systems? This would be an accurate negative framing for any type system, which all necessarily reject some correct programs.
Not really. Just it's super difficult to understand how exactly borrow checker operates and when would it allow program to compile or not, causing all kinds of unpredictable situations and unless you are "black belt"-level, difficulty providing any estimates. Not mentioning loss of morale when you have to fight it every single day.
Re: Why is Rust difficult?
#10Isn't the problem with Rust that it uses crappy pessimistic heuristics (borrow checker) for essentially NP-C problem, causing complaints where code is perfectly OK? IMO interesting design decision but I am staying away precisely because of this.
"Crappy pessimistic heuristics"
Are you talking about the borrow checker from half a decade ago? [0] Have you used the language since then? This is FUD -- it's really not hard to get code past the borrow checker anymore. Maybe every thousand lines or so you'll need to add a block or pull a temporary variable out of a one-liner, but the compiler basically tells you exactly what to do when something like that is relevant.
[0] https://pcwalton.github.io/blog/2013/01/21/the-new-borrow-ch...