Even though it's been beaten to death, I think there are still interesting discussions to be had about the problems in C, possible solutions to those, and which ones Rust provides at what cost. Really, I wish we had a few more options in the "memory safe languages without a garbage collector" space. However, junior evangelists who make themselves feel safer by finger pointing aren't likely to add much value to the conversation.
This particular post is unusual, because it's not even about a flaw in C. Appealing to Rust's culture and norms isn't compelling to me, and it will be insufferable if the newbies start regularly trotting out this nonsense.
I pasted that link to show that Rust doesn't save you from logic errors. I think the best way to get better at programming is to keep doing it while learning from mistakes. I think the best way to proselytize Rust is to finish and deliver good software with it.
[–] sunshowers 17 hours ago
[–] xscott 11 hours ago
[–] funopire 9 hours ago
Rust syntax is indeed ugly. For instance, why copy C++'s "::" for paths when Rust was a greenfield programming language without the burden of backwards compatibility? And why have some annoying ambiguities, exceptional cases or general annoyances regarding syntax, like in:
- https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/statements.html ("= Expression except LazyBooleanExpression or end with a }").
- Turbofish, could probably have been avoided by not using "<" and ">" both as type argument delimiters and as an operator for comparison. Scala 2 for example does it differently, using "[" and "]" for type argument delimiting.
- Using two different operators for what one could call "type annotations", namely both ":" and "->", in different cases, feels ugly to me.
As an aside, the contemporary feeling among many programming language designers (not specific to Rust) is to be negative about parenthesis, but parenthesis can have many advantages, and there are often ways to mitigate or cut down on their verbosity.
Leaving ugly Rust syntax aside, I agree that C is significantly limited regarding using some abstractions ergonomically. Pattern matching support, and some ways of ergonomically doing tagged unions, would arguably be nice for C, though C is minimalistic on purpose.
Though, Rust has significant weaknesses and failings even on that point. For instance, out-of-memory handling is as far as I know an active research subject in Rust regarding at least its standard library, regarding how not to just abort the process upon OOM, while C has that handled since forever, despite C requiring extra care, steps and verbosity to handle it. Also one reason why some developers like Zig, Odin, etc. over Rust.
And then there is the mess regarding panics that are not exceptions, except when panics are unwound and they can in limited cases be caught like with catch_unwind, and some Rust programs, including regarding "unsafe", has to worry about "unwind safety", similar to C++ "exception safety". Some Rust programs, in particular servers, often have a design where panics are recovered from. And there is pinning.
And then there is the issue of linking, which is a challenge regarding Rust and many Linux distributions. And where some Rust pushers claim that the approach of those Linux distributions is simply to be considered bad and outdated, instead of trying to figure out ways to see if it could be supported by Rust. And Rust is infamous for sometimes having ridiculously large build artifact sizes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1ufaef8/my_rust_works...
> My Rust workspace is 75GB. Is this normal for long-term projects?
> yeah totally normal, it's all in target/.
> I ran `cargo clean` a few months ago and it cleared out *300GB* of artefacts etc. So yeah 75GB for everything is fine lmao.
> My record is 1.6TB, cleaned it up a week and a half ago.
And regarding library design, https://amutable.com/blog/systemd-loves-rust describes different approaches between handling of path lookup:
> To reiterate an earlier point by way of example, none of the path lookup functionality provided by Rust is currently acceptable in the security sensitive system components provided by systemd.
And then there is the social stuff, like how some Rust pushers vehemently attacked gccrs for daring to attempt an alternative to rustc.
[–] aw1621107 7 hours ago
That being said...
> For instance, why copy C++'s "::" for paths when Rust was a greenfield programming language without the burden of backwards compatibility?
The concept of a strangeness budget [0] is probably relevant here - if you want to appeal to a particular audience (C++ programmers in this case), you probably want to limit "strangeness" to places where it's likely to make the largest impact. From this lens it might be interesting to look at your question from the other direction: What would the benefit be of not copying C++'s syntax in this context, if any, and is that worth spending part of your strangeness budget?
Also this comment [1] from a few days ago seems well-timed, though it's answering a slightly different question:
> The `::` syntax allows the compiler to identify and resolve all the static paths before any type inference or other analysis. This is important because macros are expanded between these stages, and can in turn introduce more static names which must also be resolved before any further compilation.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to find an authoritative explanation of why :: instead of something else, though given how old it is [2] I'd guess it's one of those strangeness budget decisions.
> ("= Expression except LazyBooleanExpression or end with a }").
Based on the syntax diagram this bit is for let-else. If you look at the RFC [3] you'll get the answer you seek:
> While allowing e.g. if {} else {} directly in the expression position is technically feasible this RFC proposes it be disallowed for programmer clarity so as to avoid ... else {} else {} situations as discussed in the drawbacks section. Boolean matches are not useful with let-else and so lazy boolean expressions are disallowed for reasons noted in future-possibilities. These types of expressions can still be used when combined in a less ambiguous manner with parentheses, which is allowed under the two expression restrictions.
> Turbofish, could probably have been avoided by not using "<" and ">" both as type argument delimiters and as an operator for comparison. Scala 2 for example does it differently, using "[" and "]" for type argument delimiting.
Rust did in fact use square brackets for generics early on, but that was later changed to angle brackets [4, 5]. I haven't been able to dig up explicit discussions as to why, though again I suspect strangeness budget concerns were at least part of the reason.
Using square brackets for types is probably not a change that can be made in isolation either; at a minimum you'd need to consider how that interacts with indexing/function calls/etc. and how those in turn interact with traits (e.g., if manual implementation of function traits is ever stabilized).
Also, from what I understand the turbofish was never strictly necessary, and in fact it actually is possible for Rust to eliminate the need for the turbofish thanks to the magic of editions ([6]). It's "just" a matter of someone taking up the cause and gathering sufficient consensus.
> Using two different operators for what one could call "type annotations", namely both ":" and "->", in different cases, feels ugly to me.
You might find this email from Graydon Hoare interesting [7]. Among other things he says:
> If the argument's about consistency, I think the consistent thing to do is to keep ":" as a separator between bindings and types. My eyes get a little fuzzy guessing the associativity of "let x : fn(T) : U;" in a way that they do not when reading "let x : fn(T) -> U;". But I suppose reasonable people could disagre, or phrase the consistency requirement differently. My math professors would cry.
[0]: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/the-language-strangeness-bu...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50369228
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130118053116/http://static.rus...
[3]: https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/3137-let-else.html
[4]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/70b009178cf050d5bb7...
[5]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/0107d6a81d2180d3a1e...
[6]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2544
[7]: https://web.archive.org/web/20201111221825/https://mail.mozi...
[–] xscott 7 hours ago
let mut a = Vec::<u32>::new();
let mut b = <Vec::<u32>>::new();
let mut c = <Vec<u32>>::new();
let mut d = Vec<u32>::new();
Last I looked, there's another oddity in the lexer/parser with a.0.1 coming out as Id(a) DOT F64(0.1) and a later stage recovers the intent Id(a) DOT Int(0) DOT Int(1).
[–] aw1621107 4 hours ago
I suppose I'm a bit more optimistic than you; I feel that most commenters tend to do a pretty good job of not veering into unrelated topics, even when things start getting heated. The lobste.rs discussion on this post, for instance, seems to have avoided these tangents.
> As for strangeness, all three of these are valid:
To mangle a quote from a certain movie, "The strangeness budget is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules" :P
I agree that most C++ programmers would expect what you showed, but as with many things the turbofish is a tradeoff (unfamiliar syntax vs. ease of parsing). I presume the Rust devs at the time thought the tradeoff was worth it and there just hasn't been sufficient consensus/motivation to change it since then.
I recall someone here talking about the oddity you mention, but I don't remember if they said it was an implementation quirk or something more fundamental to Rust's grammar.
[–] xscott 2 hours ago
Within reason, syntax doesn't really matter to me though. For instance, I was eager to learn the original sigil-based language. The downside to using familiar syntax in a radically different language is that the differences really catch you by surprise.
I fumbled around for a while before I learned those three bits of turbofish above, and I put them in my notes once I found them. It wasn't an easy thing to search for because the nomenclature and concepts are all different. Generics - not templates, traits - not classes, associated functions - not constructors. I'm still not sure about that last one. More debits to the strangeness budget.
Anyway, syntax and nomenclature are things any serious developer would get past. I thought a lot about starting a blog to document the real stumbling points I hit, but it would be tedious and whiny, and I'm not interested in building an audience.
[–] aw1621107 1 hour ago
> The downside to using familiar syntax in a radically different language is that the differences really catch you by surprise.
Definitely agreed. It's a fine needle to thread for devs and I would not be surprised if there were tradeoffs to be made between familiarity and not importing too much of the inspiring language.
> I thought a lot about starting a blog to document the real stumbling points I hit, but it would be tedious and whiny, and I'm not interested in building an audience.
For what it's worth I personally think I'd find such a thing interesting to read. Sounds like it could make for some good feedback for better onboarding as well (well, assuming you're not talking about stumbling points from your first forays into Rust. But even those can still have some intellectual value, if the interest in Graydon's reflections on Rust's early days are any indication)
I think you might want to look up my body of work, and also lay off on the baseless accusations of sockpuppetry.