Comment by josephg
6 months ago
> I cannot like Rust syntax, sorry. For me the ideal syntax is C/Go, just to be clear what I like.
I’m sorry if this comes across as dismissive, but I find it hard to take people seriously with complaints about syntax like this. Learning new syntax is really easy. Like, if you’re familiar with C & Go, you could probably learn all the syntax of rust in under an hour. The only surprising part of rust’s syntax is all the weird variants of match expressions.
Rust has some surprising semantics. Like how lifetimes work (and when you need to specify them explicitly). That stuff is legitimately difficult. But learning that if statements don’t need parenthesis is like - seriously whatever dude. If you want to spend your career never learning new stuff, software isn’t for you.
I picked up objective C about 15 years ago. The only thing most of my friends knew about it was that it had “that weird syntax”. It took no time at all to adjust. It’s just not that hard to type [] characters.
I'm very vocal that I don't like Python syntax, but I wouldn't refuse to write Python because of the syntax. If I had reason to write Python, I would grumble a bit but write the Python.
I'd say that rust has a weird level of being both verbose and terse in strange ways.
If you ever have to deal with lifetimes, then the verbosity goes up pretty significantly. And, dealing with pointers ultimately introduces multiple layers of concepts that you don't necessarily run into with C++/Go/Java.
Yet, with the type inference by default, rust can often feel shockingly terse. Doing collection manipulation is just as terse as any language you could imagine.
I think that's probably where complaints about syntax comes in.
C++ hides a lot of that complexity with move semantics, shorthands, autocoersion, and by making lifetime issues runtime problems. Languages like Go/Java/Python simply push everything onto the heap and try to avoid exposing low level memory semantics.
It's easy for me to see why someone wouldn't like rust. I think it's fine, but I'm also brain broken from perl and php.
> I'd say that rust has a weird level of being both verbose and terse in strange ways. If you ever have to deal with lifetimes, then the verbosity goes up pretty significantly.
I find rust generally more terse than both C and - especially Go, to which rust was compared upthread. Writing out lifetimes explicitly can be confusing. But I don't think it adds that much syntactic noise. Maybe 1/20 functions in my code have explicit lifetimes. That will confuse beginners, but I don't think its too bad once you're used to them.
> And, dealing with pointers ultimately introduces multiple layers of concepts that you don't necessarily run into with C++/Go/Java.
This is my #1 complaint about rust's syntax. If you ever need to interact with raw pointers within unsafe blocks, I feel like the language really fights you. It seems so strange, too - since unsafe blocks are exactly the place where it matters the most that my code is easy to read. Improving the syntax around pointers (for example by adding C's -> operator) would make unsafe blocks clearer.
It's not about learning syntax, it's about finding it generally tolerable to read. I personally find Rust syntax repulsive and would opt for a different language unless Rust was literally the only option. Thankfully it's never the only option, now or in the future.
Can you give some examples? Its hard to agree or disagree if you're not going to make any substantive claims.