[unshavedyak]

Rust is hard in that it gives you a ton of rope to hang yourself with, and some people are just hell bent on hanging themselves.

I find Rust quite easy most of the time. I enjoy the hell out of it and generally write Rust not too different than i'd have written my Go programs (i use less channels in Rust though). But i do think my comment about rope is true. Some people just can't seem to help themselves.

[nicoburns]

That seems like an odd characterization of Rust. The borrow checker and all the other type safety features, as well as features like send/sync are all about not giving you rope to hang yourself with.

[unshavedyak]

The rope in my example is complexity. Ie choosing to use "all teh features" when you don't need or perhaps even want to. Eg sometimes a simple clone is fine. Sometimes you don't need to opt for every generic and performance minded feature Rust offers - which are numerous.

Though, i think my statement is missing something. I moved from Go to Rust because i found that Rust gave me better tooling to encapsulate and reuse logic. Eg Iterators are more complex under the hood, but my observed complexity was lower in Rust compared to Go by way of better, more generalized code reuse. So in this example i actually found Go to be more complex.

So maybe a more elaborated phrase would be something like Rust gives you more visible rope to hang yourself with.. but that doesn't sound as nice. I still like my original phrase heh.

[mh2266]

I feel like it is the opposite, Go gives you a ton of rope to hang yourself with and hopefully you will notice that you did: error handing is essentially optional, there are no sum types and no exhaustiveness checks, the stdlib does things like assume filepaths are valid strings, if you forget to assign something it just becomes zero regardless of whether it’s semantically reasonable for your program to do that, no nullability checking enforcement for pointers, etc.

Rust OTOH is obsessively precise about enforcing these sort of things.

Of course Rust has a lot of features and compiles slower.

[Mawr]

> error handing is essentially optional

Theoretically optional, maybe.

> the stdlib does things like assume filepaths are valid strings

A Go string is just an array of bytes.

The rest is true enough, but Rust doesn't offer just the bare minimum features to cover those weaknesses, it offers 10x the complexity. Is that worth it?

[ErroneousBosh]

What do people generally write in Rust? I've tried it a couple of times but I keep running up against the "immutable variable" problem, and I don't really understand why they're a thing.

[aw1621107]

> but I keep running up against the "immutable variable" problem

...Is that not what mut is for? I'm a bit confused what you're talking about here.