Comment by littlestymaar
3 years ago
I mean, that's OK to express criticisms on Rust developer velocity (for instance, I totally agree that Rust doesn't particularly shine for prototyping) but then you've assembled from various parts of the internet a collection of TWENTY-ONE testimonials from people complaining about developers velocity in Rust, and not a single one of people praising Rust for the productivity boost it offers, though I can definitely assure that there are, especially for refactoring where Rust is commonly considered[1] to be first class.
Collecting pain point can be useful for the language, as it helps the Rust team to get a better vision of what they can improve, but doing such a one-sided list in an article about comparison to other languages and memory handling mechanism is at best dubious.
> Most discussions and sources online compare Rust to easy targets, like C, C++, or Python
My background is mostly Java then JavaScript and you can quote me on the fact that I found Rust to be more productive than both of them in average, especially when the project last more than a few weeks. The biggest underlying reason is different though, JS mostly suffering from dynamic typing + overall questionable language and “standard library” design, while Java is plagued by inheritance and dubious OOP patterns. When using both of these languages after Rust I also felt frustrated by the impossibility to assign strong ownership to objects, making sure they aren't being watched or mutated behind my back. Also, billion dollar mistake.
[1]:by rustaceans that is, it's not an objective measurement of any kind, but we're talking about testimonials here.
Like I mentioned in response to your other comment about this, the anecdotes were added to the borrow checking sections because that's what the initial readers were surprised about. That in turn made those sections longer. I also did mention the benefits of borrow checking (such as the concurrency benefits and influencing us into cleaner architectures), plus the downsides of garbage collection.
I didn't need any anecdotes for the borrow checker's benefits because everybody already knows them. I see how that can seem biased though, and next time I add citations to the surprising parts of an article I'll also add them more uniformly to the rest of the article as well.
Also, the article was about garbage collection itself versus borrow checking itself, not any specific languages that use them.
You make some valid comparisons between Rust and Java and Javascript, but garbage collected languages don't need to be dynamically typed, and don't need to have null, and don't need to have OOP patterns. When you compare Rust to a more modern language like Scala or Pony, you get a much truer comparison of the approaches.
That's what the article is really comparing: borrow checking versus garbage collection. Not the extra features that are correlated with them in mainstream languages.
Cheers!