Amazing, this is like the bizarro version of what I'd want. Like someone said 'hey, there's this kinda crappy language with a really cool feature, let's not make a great language with that feature, but instead take the crappy language and remove the cool feature which is the only thing keeping it from being trash'. Okay, sure, tagged unions, closures, and hygienic macros are nice; but there are plenty of other languages with the first two and when your syntax is atrocious even the most hygienic macro is going to look like something that crawled out of the sewer at R'lyeh.
Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker
61–70 of 269 posts
Re: Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker
#62There are easier ways of making segfault than writing a custom compiler.
Re: Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker
#63To me it feels like rust is barely readable sometimes. When I read some rust cost, I am often incapable to guess what it does, so it does not feel intuitive. I wish they made something simpler. At least C and C++ have a low barrier of entry and any beginner can write code. I don't think the borrow checker forced rust to be such a complicated language.
C++ doesn't have low barrier of entry, I almost quit programming as a teen because of C++.
There's a weird cognitive bias where somehow people justify "I compiled this Hello World C++ project " as "C++ is easy" and yet "I wasn't able to understand how this optimized linear algebra library works" gets classed as "Rust is hard".
In reality it matters what you already know, and whether you want to understand deeply or are just interested in enough surface understanding to write software. There's a reason C++ has an entire book about its many, many types of initialization for example.
Re: Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker
#64I'd prefer the opposite - borrow checker, but remove the useless "fn" and "let" keywords
Re: Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker
#65To me it feels like rust is barely readable sometimes. When I read some rust cost, I am often incapable to guess what it does, so it does not feel intuitive. I wish they made something simpler. At least C and C++ have a low barrier of entry and any beginner can write code. I don't think the borrow checker forced rust to be such a complicated language.
I think the barrier to entry with Rust is lower than C++. Like was way lower... And I've been writing C++ for way long than Rust, so I'm probably a bit biased
Re: Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s technically possible to do, just very complicated and hard. Quite often, prohibitively so. Still, the main idea is despite the input files are arbitrarily large, you don’t need an entire file in memory because displays aren’t remotely large enough to render a megabyte of text. Technically, you can only load a visible portion of the input file, and stream from/to disk when user scrolls. Furthermore, if you own th…
What if you don't know ahead of time how big that monitor is that you are displaying stuff on? In any case, what you are describing sounds like an ad-hoc re-implementation of virtual memory?
> What if you don't know ahead of time how big that monitor is that you are displaying stuff on?
Use a reasonable upper estimate?
> ad-hoc re-implementation of virtual memory?
If you rely on actual virtual memory instead of specially designed file format, saving large files will become prohibitively slow. On each save you have to stream the entire document from page file to actual memory, serialize the document, produce the entire file, then replace. And then when resuming editing after the save, you probably have to load the visible portion back from disk.
Re: Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker
#67Rust- is you use C with ring buffers. If you think you need dynamic memory allocation your program is underspecified.
Avoiding dynamic allocation does not avoid memory unsafety in C.
Re: Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker
#68To me it feels like rust is barely readable sometimes. When I read some rust cost, I am often incapable to guess what it does, so it does not feel intuitive. I wish they made something simpler. At least C and C++ have a low barrier of entry and any beginner can write code. I don't think the borrow checker forced rust to be such a complicated language.
> To me it feels like rust is barely readable sometimes. When I read some rust cost, I am often incapable to guess what it does, so it does not feel intuitive.
I feel torn with this sentiment.
On one hand, I totally agree. Rust's "foreign" ideas (borrowck, lifetimes, match expressions, traits, etc) make it harder to learn because there's a bunch of new concepts that nobody has really worked with before. Some of this stuff - lifetimes and borrows especially - really demand a lot of imagination on behalf of the programmer to be able to understand what's actually going on. The amount of thinking I do per shipped line of code seems higher for rust than it does for languages like Go, Typescript and C#. And sometimes C.
On the other hand, I learned C about 30 years ago. Not only have I forgotten how hard it was to learn, but I had the brain of a teenager at the time. And now I'm in my (early) 40s. I'm scared that some of the struggle I went through learning rust came because my brain is old now, and I've forgotten what its like to be out of my depth with a programming language. Learning rust requires shaking up some old neurons. And that's really good for us, but it sucks.
In reality, I think its a bit of both. I've been using rust a lot for about 3-4 years now. Its gotten way easier. But I still prototype a fair bit of algorithmic code in typescript first because I find TS makes it easier to iterate. That implies rust is actually more complex. But, some people pick rust as their first language and it seems to work out fine? I'm not sure.
> I don't think the borrow checker forced rust to be such a complicated language.
Which parts of rust seem complicated? I've found a lot of the things I struggled with at first got a lot easier with familiarity. I love traits and match expressions. I love rust's implementation of generics. I love most things about cargo and the module system. But also, some parts of rust annoy me a lot more now, a few years in.
I disagree with your comment. I think the main source of complexity in rust comes from lifetimes - which are required by the borrow checker. For example, its not obvious when you need to put lifetimes in explicitly and when you can elide them. When does the borrow checker understand my code? (Eg, can you mutably borrow two different elements in an array at the same time?). I also still don't really understand Higher-Rank Trait Bounds.
I also still find Pin really confusing. In general I think async and Futures in rust have some big design flaws. It also really bothers me that there's a class of data types that the compiler can generate and use, which are impossible to name in the language. And some of the rules around derive and traits are annoying and silly. Eg derive(Clone) on a generic struct adds the constraint T: Clone, which is straight out wrong. And rust needs a better answer to the orphan rule.
But in general, if you take out the borrow checker, I find rust to be simpler and easier to read than most C++. There's no headers. No exceptions. No wild template nonsense. And there's generally way less weird magic going on. Eg, Foo(bar); could mean about 8 different things in C++. Rust isn't like that. Rust is simple enough you can just read the standard library, even as a beginner, and its great. C++'s STL is a disaster to read.
Rust is definitely more complex than C. But you do get some lovely features for that extra cognitive overhead. Whether or not thats worth it is up to you. In general - and I've been saying this for years - I feel like the language I really want is rust 2. I can't wait for someone to take rust's best ideas and refine them into a simpler language.
Re: Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
C++ doesn't have low barrier of entry, I almost quit programming as a teen because of C++.
Imo the worst thing about starting out with C++ (which is much better with Rust), is the lack of credible package management/build system that allows you to just install packages. This used to be even more true previously than today. Nowadays, there's stuff like vcpkg, and tons of resources, but I still wouldn't call it straightforward compared to something like nuget or cargo. It tooke me more time to figure out CMa…
It does really help, in modern languages where they provide tools in the box and the ecosystem just accepts those as the default† tools, to have the default be that when you make a new project it just works, often by having it print "Hello, World!" or something else simple but definitive as proof we made a program.
† Default means just that, neither Rust's own compiler nor the Linux kernel need the cargo tooling, but these projects both have actual toolsmiths to maintain their build infrastructure and your toy program does not. There should be a default which Just Works at this small scale.
Re: Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker
#70[flagged]
Certain people feel very emotional about the compilers and interpreters they use
You couldn't pay me to work with them