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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I write Java during the day but wish I could write Rust instead.

Rust has a much nicer standard library, and the semantics and abstractions are so incredibly beautiful. It's a language that has learned from the millions of human-years that went into other languages and ecosystems. Every corner and seam in the language design speaks to this.

Traits, union type enums, pattern matching, option and result types, derive(), error handling semantics - it's all incredibly intuitive and expressive.

If I had a choice to write Rust everywhere, I would.

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Rust has its share of random-feeling nonsense, like requiring PhantomData to "work around" unused type params, or that you can't compare arrays longer than 32 elements.

1. I've never had to use PhantomData since I started coding in rust pretty much fulltime 2 years ago. 2. You can compare arrays longer than 32, but the compiler will no longer create an automatic comparison for you. So it's not that you "can't" do it. -- That said, using == to compare >32 elements sounds inefficient, perhaps check your use-case?

Not comparing arrays longer than 32 elements by == sounds like a feature to me.

The 32-count cliff is not just for Eq - it also defeats niceties like Debug, Hash, Default. This isn't a deliberate design decision, it's due to a (current) limitation of Rust's value-type generics.

The point is to illustrate that when you WTF using Rust, sometimes it's not you, it really is Rust.

A great example of this can be seen writing any recursive data-structure such as a doubly linked list.

I think there are a few places were Rust didn't get it quite right, but this seems like a weird example. The 32 length limit is a temporary limitation, not a corner that Rust is painted into. Indeed, my understanding is that the limitation at this point is being maintained artificially due to an overabundance of caution (via https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/array/trait.LengthAtMost32.htm... ). That's not WTF, that's just TODO.

It's not really a workaround (it didn't used to be required), it asks for PhantomData so it can figure out variance and infer auto traits.

Which language doesn't.

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