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A Rust shaped hole

mnvr.in

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Re: A Rust shaped hole

#101

Post by bcrl »

rich_sasha wrote: post #57
tialaramex wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this idea from a few people and I don't get it at all. Rust is certainly not the simplest language you'll run into, but C++ is incredibly baroque, they're not really comparable on this axis. One difference which is already important and I think will grow only more important over time is that Rust's Editions give it permission to go back and fix things, so it does - where in C++ it's like venturing into a ho…

C++'s complexity is coming from how eager it is to let you shoot yourself in the foot. Rust will make you sweat blood to prove the bird in the sky you're shooting at is really not your own foot.

And the gun isn't a gun, it's just a bunch of rope that you somehow got tangled into an explosive with a detonator you can't quite seem to locate.

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#102

Post by nektro »

> If someone posts a patch or submits a PR to a codebase written in C, it is easier to review than any other mainstream language.

short-circuited reading this

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#103

Post by LoganDark »

uecker wrote: post #50
tines wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples of Rust and C++ design that are over engineered?

For C++, just take lambda captures, you can do [&], [=], [a], [&a], [a = b] (and I probably forgot half), the many way you can do initialization in C++ became a meme, but it really permeates the whole language whose design is driven by enthusiasts and people who have an interest to make it more complex (trainers, book authors, consultants, etc.) For Rust, I think it is a bit of a different story and it is harder to p…

> it a bit too idealistic and not pragmatic enough

This is an ideal programming language for certain types of people. It also gives the programming language certain properties that make it useful when provable correctness is a concern (see Ferrocene).

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#105

Post by bfrog »

uecker wrote: post #50
tines wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples of Rust and C++ design that are over engineered?

For C++, just take lambda captures, you can do [&], [=], [a], [&a], [a = b] (and I probably forgot half), the many way you can do initialization in C++ became a meme, but it really permeates the whole language whose design is driven by enthusiasts and people who have an interest to make it more complex (trainers, book authors, consultants, etc.) For Rust, I think it is a bit of a different story and it is harder to p…

The language is highly productive, it’s pragmatic enough. There’s no perfect language until our brains can directly describe what we want a machine to do without intermediary translation layers like C.

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#108

Post by Sophistifunk »

genshii wrote: post #8

This hits close to home. TypeScript is also my language of choice for 90% of the software I write. I agree with the author that TypeScript is very close to the perfect level of abstraction, and I haven't seen another language with a type system that's nearly as enjoyable to use. Of course, TS (any by extension JS) obviously has its issues/complications. Bun solves a lot of the runtime-related issues/annoyances though…

I very much enjoy reading and writing TS code. What I don't enjoy is the npm ecosystem (and accompanying mindset), and what I can't stand is trying to configure the damn thing. I've been doing this since TSC was first released, and just the other day I wasted hours trying to make a simple ts-node command line program work with file-extension-free imports and no weird disagreements between the ts-node runner and the language server used by the editor.

And then gave up in disgust.

Look, I'm no genius, not by a long shot. But I am both competent and experienced. If I can't make these things work just by messing with it and googling around, it's too damned hard.

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#109

Post by blamestross »

spooneybarger wrote: post #107

I've written a ton of C in my life and a C lot of Go and I was rofl at the "no spooky action at distance" lines. This was brilliant performance art. Bless your heart Dear Author, I adore you.

Everyone who has said the phrase "Spooky action at a distance" has been proven wrong :)

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#110

Post by materielle »

tines wrote: post #31
uecker wrote: post #20

It is a bit unclear to me why somebody who rejects C++ because "I once spent an entire year in the heaven of C++, walking around in a glorious daze of std::vector and RAII, before one day snapping out of it and realizing that I was just spawning complexity that is unrelated to the problem at hand." (which I can absolutely agree with!) is picking Rust from all options. If there is a language that can rival C++ in term…

The two are incomparable in both quality and quantity. The complexity of Rust comes from the fact that it's solving complex problems. The complexity of C++ comes from a poorly thought out design and backwards-compatibility. (Not to slight the standards committee; they are smart people, and did the best with what they had.) Anothere way of putting it is, if you didn't care about backwards-compatibility, you could grea…

The C++ standard committee is definitely smart. But language design requires sense beyond just being smart.

They didn’t do the best with what they had. Sure, some problems were caused by C backwards compatibility.

But so much of the complexity and silliness of the language was invented by the committee themselves.

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