← Back to context

Comment by kermatt

1 day ago

> I'm convinced no more than a handful of humans understand all of C# or C++

How would the proportion of humans that understand all of Rust compare?

For Rust vs C++, I'd say it'll be much easier to have a complete understanding of Rust. C++ is an immensely complex language, with a lot of feature interactions.

C# is actually fairly complex. I'm not sure if it's quite at the same level as Rust, but I wouldn't say it's that far behind in difficulty for complete understanding.

Rust managed to learn a lot from C++ and other languages' mistakes.

So while it has quite a bit of essential complexity (inherent in the design space it operates: zero overhead low-level language with memory safety), I believe it fares overall better.

Like no matter the design, a language wouldn't need 10 different kinds of initializer syntaxes, yet C++ has at least that many.

For Rust I'd expect the implementation to be the real beast, versus the language itself. But not sure how it compares to C++ implementation complexity.

Rust isn’t that complicated if you have some background in non GC languages.

  • Parent say _all_ of it, not a subset for everyday use.

    • There's a different question too, that I think is more important (for any language): how much of the language do you need to know in order to use it effectively. As another poster mentioned, the issue with C++ might not be the breath of features, but rather how they interact in non-obvious ways.