Comment by josephg

> 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.