alt Hacker News> [...] is trivial in Rust [...] it just requires [...]
This is a tombstone-quality statement. It's the same framing people tossed around about C++ and Perl and Haskell (also Prolog back in the day). And it's true, insofar as it goes. But languages where "trivial" things "just require" rapidly become "not so trivial" in the aggregate. And Rust has jumped that particular shark. It will never be trivial, period.
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Nah, learning Rust is trivial. I've done it 3 or 4 times now.
A language that makes making a global mutable variable feel like making any other binding is a anti-pattern and something I'm glad Rust doesn't try to pretend is the same thing.
If you treat shared state like owned state, you're in for a bad time.
It just requires unsafe. One concept, and then you can make a globally mutable variable.
And it's a good concept, because it makes people feel a bit uncomfortable to type the word "unsafe", and they question whether a globally mutable variable is in fact what they want. Which is great! Because this is saving every future user of that software from concurrency bugs related to that globally mutable variable, including ones that aren't even preserved in the software now but that might get introduced by a later developer who isn't thinking about the implications of that global unsafe!
He’s talking about adding a keyword. That is all. I’d call that trivial.
> languages where "trivial" things "just require" rapidly become "not so trivial" in the aggregate
Sure. And in C and Zig, it's "trivial" to make a global mutable variable, it "just requires" you to flawlessly uphold memory access invariants manually across all possible concurrent states of your program.
Stop beating around the bush. Rust is just easier than nearly any other language for writing concurrent programs, and it's not even close (though obligatory shout out to Erlang).