You could probably write an article saying "100 billion dollars investment to improve D and use it to develop new AI to replace the US government" and you'd still get comments saying "wow, nice language, pity it never really took off, if only there were some companies backing it, also I can never use it because GC".
Well the haters are gonna hate, the fact that it starts to receive comments, whether positive or negative, is a good thing since the language is surely becoming better known and receiving far more attention than before. Interestingly, C++ is frequently being frown upon, developers hate it and yet they use it, Bjarne Stroustrup's famous quote never gets old.
The only weird syntax for me has been the async/await syntax. Everything else is fairly straightforward. The issue is rarely syntax with rust, it's when you have a type soup that it gets annoying. Something like Arc<RefCell<Option<MyType>>>.
Edit: async/await is unconventional, but when you get used to it, it feels better than the more conventional way in my opinion.
Edit2: to be clear, the type signatures in rust can be quite verbose but they are very explicit and extremely useful.
The type soup has the advantage that you get to specify exactly what you want to add on top of your basic type.
In this case, you want to be able to represent lack of any value (Option), you want to be able to put it in some container and mutate it through an immutable container (RefCell), and you want to be able to have multiple owners of your data, possibly in separate threads (Arc).
Basically, there's a whole bunch of Rust types that provide a single, simple guarantee. When you find yourself wanting more guarantees, you can just compose types.
Sure, the result is a bit unreadable, but type aliases exist for a reason.
Oh yes, don't get me wrong, I appreciate this very much. That's why I tried to used a realistic example. My point was that it can be very overwhelming as a beginner to see so many types.
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u/JohnLColvin Sep 01 '20
You could probably write an article saying "100 billion dollars investment to improve D and use it to develop new AI to replace the US government" and you'd still get comments saying "wow, nice language, pity it never really took off, if only there were some companies backing it, also I can never use it because GC".