- The types help, seeing "WGPUSwapChainId" tells me exactly what sort of object is returned (a reference to some object held elsewhere), we don't get this in Rust because of type inference.
- Rust doesn't help in this example because it's just a bunch of API calls... so it's a more complex language for nothing. Obviously this doesn't generalize.
- The event handling is much simpler in the C code, this also doesn't generalize.
Might be worth mentioning that (AFAIK) type inference is entirely optional in Rust. If you prefer to write explicit types on your decls that's fine. (I suspect there are pathological cases where the type is impractical to write, but you'd have been screwed then anyway.)
This won't help you when reading other people's code, obviously.
Check out RLS (the rust language server) to get intellisense like this working in your favorite editor.
I think the solution is for diff viewers incl. those on the web to support something like intellisense, but obviously we are a very long way away from that.
I tend to find, personally, that this kind of thing doesn't interfere strongly with reviewing. I think this is because I have an extensive background in dynamically typed languages and ones with strong inference like Rust, so I'm more used to it, whereas people who don't come from said backgrounds prefer more explicitness. YMMV of course!
-Z unstable-options -Zunpretty=hir,typed
// source
pub fn square(num: i32) -> i32 {
num * num
}
// expanded
use ::std::prelude::v1::*;
extern crate std;
pub fn square(num: i32)
-> i32 ({ ((num as i32) * (num as i32) as i32) } as i32)