[petmon]

Rust's "feature surface area" reaches or exceeds that of C++ through procedural macros, which surfaces the entire Rust AST to the developer. Major Rust crates like serde use this feature, and when it goes wrong the errors are actively misleading. I've personaly been bitten by this, it's incredibly frustrating to debug. https://serde.rs/derive.html#troubleshooting

[xavxav]

I agree that debugging bad macros is annoying, especially proc-macros but that’s not comparable since by their very nature proc macros are no more powerful than hand written code. They cannot create new semantics, at best they can add new syntax sugar for things that already exist in the language.

[est31]

proc macros are their own walled off thing with well defined input of tokens, and well defined output (also of tokens). You have tooling to inspect their output (cargo expand). Compare this to the average C++ feature which is usually implicit and not visible in syntax and interacts with other C++ features in interesting ways that you have to keep in mind.