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Comment by hubert123 | Hacker News Reader

I cannot agree more with his conclusions about Rust, you can overlook a lot of problems. But the language itself is just such an arcane pain to deal with, the author really brought this out: Even just writing and printing few lines of strings out has possibly hours of gotchas in it. Add a little IO and you're looking at days. It's not a question of a lack of documentation, I just think the language is weird. I truly wanted Rust to be great and I keep looking at it wanting it to be better but it just isn't. Isn't it funny how in the real world, suddenly the so lauded 'type safety' really just doesn't matter that much in practice. A simpler language overall would have made a much bigger impact than any generics.

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>Isn't it funny how in the real world, suddenly the so lauded 'type safety' really just doesn't matter that much in practice.

I've been writing Javascript for years and if there's one thing I've learned it's that type safety matters on the large scale. Don't get me wrong: I actually love Javascript. It's my go-to tool when I want to just get things done. But when you start scaling things out and get a lot of moving parts going, type safety really helps lift the mental burden of tracking everything yourself. That's why TypeScript is so popular.

I've been a huge fan of dynamically/weakly typed languages for a while but I've fallen in love with Rust. Yes, it can be a bit painful at the start but it doesn't take hours to get basic IO working and it's quite beautiful once you get into it. The mind-bending part is the ownership model because nothing else has ever had something like that. But, you know, that's just my opinion.

I can google-SO program in PHP or Python, I did it recently with very little knowledge of those languages (I know other languages and have some common sense, so I know what to look for). Other languages like Haskell, C++ or Rust do not fall in that category, you have to really understand, what you're doing, before you could do something useful. That's fine, IMO. Not every language should be easy, if that complexity brings some advantage. And for Rust that complexity does bring the advantage: 0-cost memory safety. It's an unique advantage, so it's worth a little time investment.

  #include <stdio.h>
  int main(void) {
    printf("hello world\n");
    return 0;
  }

Rust:

  fn main() {
    println!("hello world");
  }

I think it gets many things right - it makes the hard things possible (such as safe concurrency).

What it fails at is making the simple things simple. Making a program that concatenates some strings shouldn't be hard, and the result should be clean and readable. That obviously hasn't been a design goal yet, but I hope the focus will turn to making tresholds lower and syntax less painful soon.

??? Literally the first example in the Rust Book teaches you how to do this; you can do IO within the hour, easily.

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