Comment by sidkshatriya
4 hours ago
One of the biggest knocks against Rust as a systems programming language is that it has weak compile-time and metaprogramming capabilities compared to Zig and C++
In the space of language design, everything "more powerful" is not necessary good. Sometimes less power is better because it leads to more optimisable code, less implementation complexity, less abstraction, better LSP support. TL;DR More flexibility and complexity is not always good.
Though I would also challenge the fact that Rust's metaprogramming model is "not powerful enough". I think it can be.
But compile-time processing is certainly useful in a performance-oriented language.
And not only for performance but also for thread safety (eliminates initialization races, for example, for non-trivial objects).
Rust is just less powerful. For example you cannot design something that comes evwn close to expression templates libraries.
> For example you cannot design something that comes evwn close to expression templates libraries.
You keep saying this and it's still wrong. Rust is quite capable of expression templates, as its iterator adapters prove. What it isn't capable of (yet) is specialization, which is an orthogonal feature.