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ozgrakkurttoday at 4:43 AM6 repliesview on HN

This sounds insane at this point. The language already has too many features. Would be cool if all these people with amazing visions could move it elsewhere.

Rust is fast tracking being as bad as c++ in terms of just garbage in it.

IMO the worst thing about c++ isn't that it is unsafe but it is extemely difficult to learn to a satisfying degree.

This is already kind of feels true for Rust and it will be surely true if people just keep shoving their amazing ideas into it.

IMO even async/tokio/error-handling aren't that well though out in rust. So much for keeping things out of the language.

Maybe Rust just wasn't what I wanted and I am salty about it but it feels a bit annoying when I see posts like this and considering where Rust is now after many years of shoving stuff into it


Replies

zozbot234today at 5:10 AM

> The language already has too many features.

That's actually the point. Many of these additions can be phrased as unifying existing features and allowing them to be used in previously unusable ways and contexts. There's basically no real increase in user-perceived complexity. The Rust editions system is a key enabler of this, and C++ has nothing comparable.

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satvikpendemtoday at 5:23 AM

It doesn't have too many features, it arguably does not have enough. The issue is that the current features don't play nicely with each other, so much of the work has been in making sure they do, such as with async traits as an example: there is no reason why you can make a function async but not inside a trait, and this was the case until very recently.

Beyond that, what the article shows is exactly what I want, I want as much type safety as possible especially for critical systems code which is increasingly what Rust is being used for.

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j-kriegertoday at 7:27 AM

After working with Rust for half a decade I‘m afraid I have to agree. A lot of the newer features have weird edge cases with promises for fixes stuck in bikeshedding hell for years (looking at you const generics). Alternatively feature authors wait on dependecies that will never ship.

xiphias2today at 5:04 AM

The main problem I see is adding things slowly instead of automatic rewrites.

I remember adding lifetimes in some structs and then wanted to use generics and self pointing with lifetimes because that made sense, and then it didn't work because the composition of some features was not yet part of Rust.

Another thing: there are annotations for lifetimes in function signatures, but not inside the functions where there is a lot of magic happening that makes understanding them and working with them really hard: after finally the borrow checking gave me errors, that's when I just started to getting lots of lifetime errors, which were not shown before.

Rust should add these features but take out the old ones with guaranteed automatic update path.

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jcranmertoday at 5:42 AM

You're not wrong here. Not that I'm entirely up-to-speed on all of the deep Rust discussions, but the sense I have of the language evolution is that while there is definitely a loud contingent of people pushing for a lot of the complexity of full effect systems or linear types, these sorts of proposals aren't actually all that likely to actually move forward in the language.

(I should note that of all of the features mentioned in this blog post, the only one I actually expect to see in Rust someday is pattern types, and that's largely because it partially exists already in unstable form to use for things like NonZeroU32.)

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fabiensanglardtoday at 4:56 AM

I agree that the complexity is getting scary. They keep on adding more and more stuff and it is hard to follow.

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