[Vipsy]

I love how it shows that you can have both performance and safety without jumping through hoops. The little details of memory management really shape how we end up writing code, often without even noticing. Rust makes it possible to get close to the hardware while still keeping you out of the usual trouble spots. It’s one of those things you appreciate more the longer you use it

[johnisgood]

Erm what? The article contradicts this. I'd push back on "without jumping through hoops". The article itself demonstrates 6 layers of abstraction (Vec<T> -> RawVec<T> -> RawVecInner -> Unique<u8> -> NonNull<u8> -> *const u8) built on unsafe primitives. The standard library does the hoop-jumping for you, which is valuable, but the hoops exist, they're just relocated.

I bet Vec's implementation is full of unsafe blocks and careful invariant management. Users face different hoops: lifetime wrangling, fighting the borrow checker on valid patterns, Pin semantics, etc. Rust trades runtime overhead for upfront costs: compile-time complexity and developer time wrestling with the borrow checker which is often the right trade, but it's not hoop-free.

The "close to hardware" claim needs qualification too. You're close to hardware through abstractions that hide significant complexity. Ada/SPARK gives formal correctness guarantees but requires proof effort and runtime checks (unless you use SPARK which is a subset of Ada). C gives you actual hardware access but manual memory management. Each has trade-offs - Rust's aren't magically absent.

[zozbot234]

It's fine https://github.com/model-checking/verify-rust-std/issues/283 https://github.com/model-checking/verify-rust-std/pull/481 (But until two weeks ago, it wasn't - you could in theory cause UB by writing purely safe code within the Vec<T> implementation.)

[ozy]

Most of those are abstractions, but not a runtime overhead. NonNull even enables an optimization not available to most other languages.

And you can wonder, is this accidental complexity? Or is this necessary complexity?

[alickz]

I come from a Swift/Kotlin background and I've been learning Rust for fun in my spare time

From what I heard online I was expecting it to be a lot harder to understand!

The moving/borrowing/stack/heap stuff isn't simple by any means, and I'm sure as I go it will get even harder, but it's just not as daunting as I'd expected

It helps that I love compiler errors and Rust is full of them :D Every error the compiler catches is an error my QA/users don't

[Tade0]

The language and associated tooling keep improving.

Over the course of the last decade I've made several attempts to learn Rust, but was always frustrated with having code that reasonably should compile, but didn't and I had to run the build to even find that out.

Now we have rust-analyzer and non-lexical lifetimes, both tremendously improving the overall experience.

I still don't enjoy the fact that borrows are at the struct level, so you can't just borrow one field (there's even a discussion on that somewhere in Rust's) repo, but I can work around that.

To drive the point home: I'm a frontend developer. This is a very different environment compared to what I'm used to, yet I can be productive in it, even if at a slower pace in comparison.

[LoganDark]

> It helps that I love compiler errors and Rust is full of them :D Every error the compiler catches is an error my QA/users don't

amen! I despise Python even though I used to love it, and that's because it's full of runtime errors and unchecked exceptions. The very instant I learned more strongly typed languages, I decided never to go back.