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Comment by z3phyr | Hacker News Reader

Rust is very sweet, but it lacks the simplicity of C. I get that ML style programming is all the rage today, and ML itself is a simple language, but programming languages today carry a lot of baggage and styles, maybe to cater to wide range of programmers. But in the end, it complicates the language. I have noticed that a lot of people find Rust or Scala to be very hard because of these reasons.

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The simplicity of C relative to Rust is an illusion in the sense that the main thing that makes Rust feel difficult at first ("fighting the borrow checker") relates to a concern that's relevant to C (allocation lifetimes), but in the case of C the burden of dealing with the issue is on the programmer and not on the compiler.

> Rust is very sweet, but it lacks the simplicity of C.

That's like saying a SawStop (http://www.sawstop.com/) lacks a simplicity of a sawblade. I mean - Yeah, sure, but sawblade also won't stop you from turning yourself into amputee.

I understand Rust can be overly verbose, but main complexity comes from the borrow checker and the effect adding another kind of type, to track lifetimes. The lifetime system is the main selling point.

There are other sources of complexity in Rust, but I am glad to say both Rust/Scala seem to be looking for a way to simplify things.

Perhaps if the SawStop would complain about using certain types of wood after another, forced you to pick the wood from the pile in a certain order, etc. I bet woodworkers would be quite annoyed by that.

This is in fact what the Sawstop does because if you use the wrong material it will engage and destroy your very expensive saw blades. This is one of the (many) reasons why SawStops aren't more popular and why they are in fact removable. So really, the sawstop is like Rust in that you can do what you want when it considers it dangerous by embedding c code, but it requires you to put in an annoying level of effort.

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