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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Committees tend to design less beautiful things. Look at modern c++ too. What a mess. Everyone in the committee has to jam in their favorite feature, much of which is sugar.
Modern C++ is actually going relatively OK? You may be thinking of the old, pre-C++11 C++?
> (Swift at least traps in release by default -- I wish Rust had chosen to).
I enable it in release on serious projects:
[profile.release]
overflow-checks = trueThe Rust he wanted sounds a lot like Ada.
As someone casually following Rust and haven't touched it or C++ in probably 5+ years (but keeping tabs in hope of coming back to that world), I feel like a lot of decisions he mentions are what made me optimistic about Rust adoption/positioning itself as a modern C++ replacement. So I kind of agree with his conclusion - his version of Rust would be much less interesting to me, and I think a lot of it's current users…
> It's easier to work with than C++, but that's fairly faint praise.
So, while Rust positions itself as a C++ alternative with all the complexities that C++ developers love, it may become less attractive for other use cases. For instance, I find it highly questionable to develop a web app in Rust...
A bunch of things you don't like about Rust? Turns out that the person who originally created the language doesn't like them either. I know that the main point is about governance and how having a BDFL would have led to a completely different language but I really would have preferred the Graydon-BDFL-Rust to what we have today. Very interesting article, worth a read.
One highlight from the article: > Traits. I generally don't like traits / typeclasses. To my eyes they're too type-directed, too global, too much like programming and debugging a distributed set of invisible inference rules, and produce too much coupling between libraries in terms of what is or isn't allowed to maintain coherence. Very much this! > I wanted (and got part way into building) a first class module system…
Being a relative rust noob compared to other languages, I always felt traits were a super power when compared to eg interfaces in Java/C++ and flexible but with useful constraints compared to the structural typing nature of Typescript interfaces
As someone casually following Rust and haven't touched it or C++ in probably 5+ years (but keeping tabs in hope of coming back to that world), I feel like a lot of decisions he mentions are what made me optimistic about Rust adoption/positioning itself as a modern C++ replacement. So I kind of agree with his conclusion - his version of Rust would be much less interesting to me, and I think a lot of it's current users…
I was at the sidelines when Rust 1.0 was being made and I think it got into an llvm induced feedback loop. Slowly turning into C or C++ with other features but the same type, object and memory model. Part of the reason was Rust's desire to show itself as a direct competitor w.r.t performance, I think.
Say you use a vector in C++. You push one element and pop two. In Rust that's a None. In C++ the answer is UB (in my case 43).
Very interesting insight from Graydon, in hindsight I too would have loved something more towards ML than C++. I never liked the kitchen sink approach that I see first C++, now Rust moving towards, but I respect what Rust has managed to solidify into. It's a good language. That said, I still hate async with a passion, it makes the language more complex and not very elegant (i.e. function coloring). And now that I kno…
Rust's async doesn't have the limitation author described – you can spawn and block both (Tokio has some limits there, but that's Tokyo's choice, not language limitation), making "color" largely irrelevant.
The second point was that both should have identical syntax, which Rust deliberately chose not to, because from Rusts perspective that would be too much implicit magic.
I’ve always seen safety and lifetimes and borrowing as the main value prop, so I was surprised to see he was sort of aiming at an ML without GC, rather than a C++ that doesn’t blow up.