zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
I encountered Rust sometime around 2010. I was working a couple of blocks away from Mozilla's Mountain View office and would often overhear people talking about it at Dana Street Coffee Roasting. A couple years later I was working at Mozilla trying to unf*ck their TLS and libpkix implementations. The team rocked, but management sucked. The best part about it is I kept bumping into Brendan Eich and having great conversations about Lisp. I can't remember if P. C. Walton worked there, but several occasions he was in the office and gave me a VERY good, VERY succinct description of the language.

I wrote a fair amount of Rust code in 2012, none of it on a real project like servo. All of it just code to try to understand what the language was trying to make easy. None of that code compiles any more. (Or enough of it fails that I stopped looking at it.)

It's not so much a "critique" as it is a confirmation that when the crustaceans tell you the language definition isn't finished yet, believe them. I like the feel of Rust much more than C/C++, but I have C code I wrote in 1982 that still compiles and does what you think it should do. C++ code from 1990 still seems to compile. I have Rust code from 2014 that won't even compile.

Rust is a cool language and I hope it eventually settles down enough to be considered for "real" projects. I've done a little bit of Ada in the last year and I really, really want something better. But... reverse in-compatibility is a deal-breaker for some corners of the commercial world.

And yes, I know that (like Python) you can build an environment that lets you continue to compile old code with old compilers and some old code with new compilers. But the projects I'm talking about have life-times measured in decades. Will rustc in 2055 be able to compile a program written today? It doesn't seem to be on the top of minds of most of the Rust community.

I'm not saying Rust is ugly. In fact, I really like some aspects of the language. And post 1.0 is MUCH better than pre 1.0. But if we could go for a few years without breaking changes that would be nice.

>>OhMead+KIm
> I'm not saying Rust is ugly

I'll definitely say that. It's my biggest problem with the language. Type variable declaration lists, pub keyword instead of export lists, macros instead of functors, out-of-line method declaration, special keywords and symbols all over the place that could have just been built-in type constructors, module accessor is the horrible ::, which synergies with a weird decision to nest modules extensively so that code is even noisier.

Rust is a very ugly language to me. Ugly enough that while I like many aspects of its semantic design, I will never use it personally. I would rate it to be about as ugly as Ada, just for different reasons.

>>ux2664+0gn
Sure. You can call anything ugly. I got in trouble with Walton because I said the borrow checker should be an external tool for C++. With the exception of Lisp, which is $DEITY's own language, all languages have problems. There are aspects of Rust that I like more than C++ (traits vs. classes, for instance.)

The main difference here is I won't down-vote you because you say you don't like Rust.