Comment by zamalek
3 years ago
> Unsupported Patterns
> Graphs; it generally only thrives with a strict tree hierarchy of data.
This is actually now supported: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/rc/struct.Rc.html#method.new_c...
That being said, Rust has taught me that I was vastly overusing graphs (structurally, not algorithmically) in my code. Graphs are extremely difficult to reason about; a fact that I learned after approaching an unfamiliar Rust codebase for the first time. It was the brain equivalent of putting down a screwdriver and picking up a powertool, my mind just relaxed.
That alone is one reason I think that every developer should try and "suffer" under that constraint for at least one or two real problems (whether with Rust, or some other language). You'll end up writing better code in your preferred language.
The removal of a feature is sometimes a feature. While roads limit where you can drive, they also mean you don't have to figure out how to traverse a mountain in a Lambo.
That is how you write programs in competitive programming, just put all the data you need in a nice table structure and use indexes instead of references. It is very readable and easy to reason about for simple programs and is extremely fast to write and performant, that is how you are able to implement novel algorithms in minutes. But it doesn't scale, indexes aren't type checked nor do they tell you which collection they point towards.
But yeah, knowing how to program like that is useful, learning new style will never hurt, but being forced to code like you code in competitive programming isn't a good thing for a language.