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[return to "A Look at Rust from 2012"]
1. ramon1+J3m[view] [source] 2025-12-03 15:32:11
>>todsac+(OP)
I actually liked @T because you would pronounce it as "At T".

You could say "The address at T". Curious why people hated it, I might be missing something.

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2. stevek+lvm[view] [source] 2025-12-03 17:32:19
>>ramon1+J3m
@T had a number of issues. The first was just that it was weird. People tend to not like weird things. Rust developed a reputation for "that language with a bunch of pointer types that are all weird."

The real reason it was removed in the end was just that it elevated a library concept into syntax. Today's Arc<T>/Rc<T> split isn't really possible in an @T world, for example. Shared ownership is a good concept, but you don't need special syntax to indicate it.

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3. zozbot+oym[view] [source] 2025-12-03 17:47:42
>>stevek+lvm
> The real reason it was removed in the end was just that it elevated a library concept into syntax.

Rust still does this in all sorts of silly ways, such as the ! type. What's the point of wasting an entire symbol that could have plenty of alternate uses on something that's so rarely used and could easily be defined as either a library type (empty enum) or at least be given a custom keyword, such as `never`? (Introduce it over an edition boundary, if you must preserve backwards compatibility.) The fact that it involves some compiler magic is no excuse; that's why Rust uses "langitem" markers within its core library.

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