Comment by Inityx

6 months ago

I don't think materially contrasting yourself with your direct competition quite constitutes a "feud war"

The downvoting patterns of anything that is mildly critical of Rust (see above) very much indicates a feud war. Rust has a dogmatic, aggressive and self-righteous community that uses any available tactic to push their language through.

The Rust literature is poorly written compared to C and Ada and the argumentation style on forums is sloppy, aggressive, and often unintelligible.

Which is a pity, because the language itself does not seem to be so bad.

  • > Rust has a dogmatic, aggressive and self-righteous community that uses any available tactic to push their language through.

    I'm confused, because that's not been my experience of the rust community at all. I've been very critical of certain aspects of rust over the last few years, and I've (for the most part) gotten fair, reasonable feedback in response.

    > The Rust literature is poorly written compared to C and Ada

    I'm even more confused. Which literature are you looking at? Can you provide some examples so we’re all talking about the same thing?

    I find most of the documentation around rust to be the best in the business. Eg here's the reference documentation for iterator trait, in the standard library:

    https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/iter/trait.Iterator.html

    Every function in that interface is well documented, with examples.

    Here's the equivalent for C++:

    https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/iterator/iterator.html

    Where is the rest of it? This doesn't describe how iterators work at all. Or how to use them. There's more stuff in the header file but its inadequate by far.

    So much C library code is documented in ad-hoc ways - often through doxygen, which is a disaster. Eg here's the documentation for LMDB. LMDB is one of the most thoroughly documented C APIs I've seen, but I find this almost totally unusable. I often find myself reading the source instead. There's not even any links to the source from here:

    http://www.lmdb.tech/doc/group__mdb.html

    In rust, any published crate automatically has a docs.rs/cratename link. Eg for serde's reference manual:

    https://docs.rs/serde/

    And then for the "guide" style explanation they wrote a book:

    https://serde.rs/

    Where is any documentation for the C standard library? As far as I can tell, there's no official documentation at all. There are man pages. But in comparison to rust's docs, or mdn for javascript, man pages are nowhere near as good. I’d give examples but this comment is too long already.

    • > So much C library code is documented in ad-hoc ways - often through doxygen, which is a disaster. Eg here's the documentation for LMDB. LMDB is one of the most thoroughly documented C APIs I've seen, but I find this almost totally unusable. I often find myself reading the source instead. There's not even any links to the source from here:

      > http://www.lmdb.tech/doc/group__mdb.html

      How is doxygen a disaster?

      Why do we need links to the source code? Doxygen is already embedded in the source, you should already be reading the source code on your local machine. It makes no sense to go searching across the web for information that's already stored on your local machine. Especially since you have no idea if the version you find on the web matches the version you're using locally.

      1 reply →