Comment by oersted
1 year ago
I don’t entirely agree, you can get used to the borrow checker relatively quickly and you mostly stop thinking about it.
What tends to make Rust complex is advanced use of traits, generics, iterators, closures, wrapper types, async, error types… You start getting these massive semi-autogenerated nested types, the syntax sugar starts generating complex logic for you in the background that you cannot see but have to keep in mind.
It’s tempting to use the advanced type system to encode and enforce complex API semantics, using Rust almost like a formal verifier / theorem prover. But things can easily become overwhelming down that rabbit hole.
It's just overengineered. Many Rust folks don't realize it because they come from C++ and suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.
How is it overengineered?
That's my personal opinion after I've learned it and read Klabnik's book. I'm aware that other people's mileage differs. I'm listing a few reasons below.
- Overall too complex
- Wrong philosophy: demanding the user to solve problems instead of solving problems for the user
- Trying to provide infinite backwards compatibility with crates, which leads to hidden bitrot
- Slow compilation times
- Claims to be "safe" but allows arbitrary unsafe code, and it's everywhere.
- Adding features to fix misfeatures (e.g. all that lifetime cruft; arc pointers) instead of fixing the underlying problem
- Hiding implementations with leaky abstractions (traits)
- Going at great length to avoid existing solutions so users re-invent it (e.g. OOP with inheritance; GC), or worse, invent more complex paradigms to work around the lack (e.g. some Rust GUI efforts; all those smart pointer types to work around the lack of GC)
- A horrendous convoluted syntax that encourages bad programming style: lot's of unwrap, and_then, etc. that makes programs hard to read and audit.
- Rust's safe code is not safe: "Rust’s safety guarantees do not include a guarantee that destructors will always run. [...] Thus, allowing mem::forget from safe code does not fundamentally change Rust’s safety guarantees."
It already has similar complexity and cognitive demands as C++ and it's going to get worse. IMHO, that's also why it's popular. Programmers love shitty languages that allow them to show off. Boring is good.
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