The Rust borrow checker from a different perspective
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The Rust borrow checker from a different perspective
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Re: The Rust borrow checker from a different perspective
#2As someone who is not familiar with Rust at all, wow—what refreshingly helpful error messages!
Re: The Rust borrow checker from a different perspective
#3As someone who is not familiar with Rust at all, wow—what refreshingly helpful error messages!
Yes, the compiler's error messages are extremely good. They often give correct and useful suggestions on how to change code to make it compile. This can be invaluable when dealing with trickier corners of the language such as explicit lifetimes.
Re: The Rust borrow checker from a different perspective
#4How do you get back something owned by something else?
Re: The Rust borrow checker from a different perspective
#5How do you get back something owned by something else?
You don't, unless they pass it to you (as a return value or function argument).
Re: The Rust borrow checker from a different perspective
#6As someone who is not familiar with Rust at all, wow—what refreshingly helpful error messages!
Can someone chime in as to why C++ compilers in particular are notorious for extremely verbose yet unhelpful error messages? Is it something endemic to parsing the language that there can't be errors as helpful as Rust's?
Re: The Rust borrow checker from a different perspective
#7As someone who is not familiar with Rust at all, wow—what refreshingly helpful error messages!
Can someone chime in as to why C++ compilers in particular are notorious for extremely verbose yet unhelpful error messages? Is it something endemic to parsing the language that there can't be errors as helpful as Rust's?
The short answer, devoid of some interesting nuance, is that C++’s template system is similar to an untyped functional programming language, so the errors you get are the compiler’s attempt to make sense of the large tree of nonsense it couldn’t reduce.
C++ also suffers from years of backwards-compatibility twister creating abundant cases of ambiguity if you do something wrong. The compiler will do it’s best, but if your code suddenly parses wildly differently because your semicolon is missing, oh well. Rust is far simpler in that regard, so there are fewer instances where your code might accidentally make sense to the compiler if you have an error.
Re: The Rust borrow checker from a different perspective
#8As someone who is not familiar with Rust at all, wow—what refreshingly helpful error messages!
Can someone chime in as to why C++ compilers in particular are notorious for extremely verbose yet unhelpful error messages? Is it something endemic to parsing the language that there can't be errors as helpful as Rust's?
As well as templates, C++ has function overloading, so when a function is named in an error message it has to show all the arguments as well. And if it can't find a function variant that matches a call, it'll print out a "did you mean this one?" message for all of them.
Re: The Rust borrow checker from a different perspective
#9Great write up, when I started coding in Rust, I sometimes used to get frustrated, but then realised how helpful the checker is and really made me think about structure and mechanics of my code, making me a better developer.
Re: The Rust borrow checker from a different perspective
#10From that writeup, it seems like one is forced to program Rust in an object oriented manner. Is it possible to program it in a functional manner like Lisp, or a procedural manner like BASIC or assembler?