> Rust is far simpler in that regard, so there are fewer instances where your code might accidentally make sense to the compiler if you have an error.

I say this from a place of love for Rust, but the first time you run into a massive generic type tree error thats root cause is a type parameter three levels deep not implementing Send (or some other trait) it takes your breath away.

There are some great jokes about this in Deisel and Futures for example. It makes Java generics look like a baby just starting to craw.

The error messages are good, you just need to go grab a coffee while you read through the book on type theory that’s been dumped to your screen.

Let me just stress the first point, because that's exactly where Rust and C++ differ: C++ templates really are untyped. There is no way to check whether a template definition is correct. A C++ compiler has to first expand the templates ("complete monomorphisation") and then perform type checking. Any errors you get will be in terms of the template instantiations, not your original code.

Unlike C++, Rust has a type system for the full language. In particular, traits are type checked once and you get errors in terms of the code you wrote yourself. There are other compilers that use complete monomorphisation, such as the MLton compiler for Standard ML, where you don't hear horror stories about terrifying error messages because your code was checked before being specialized.

I want to stress that this is a terrible design decision in terms of usability, because it is incredibly attractive from an implementation perspective. Parametric types are a delicate issue in an imperative language and always end up rejecting some perfectly fine programs. Monomorphisation both eliminates this issue and potentially leads to more efficient code, but your type errors will suffer.

I could say more about this - there are more trade-offs involved - but actually working with template heave C++ code is a better argument than anything I could say.

...That said, the examples in the blog post actually don't use any complicated machinery, and the quality of the compiler errors just comes down to very good engineering on the part of the Rust development team. :)

And of course C++ harks back to an era where error messages were not considered much of a concern. It took the Clang project for C compilation errors to start improving (including kicking gcc's ass), and C is not the most difficult language to parse/validate.