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Comment by dpc_pw | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I used to be big on C, and grew to very dislike C++ (because it's simple insane). Rust is my language of choice for years now.

IMO, Rust shares the same inner-simplicity that C has, but combined with ability to build and use bulletproof higher-level abstractions. The same way I roughly knew what machine instructions (roughly) my C code produces, I know what machine instructions my Rust code produces.

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Rust definitely does not share the simplicity of C.

It is the equivalent of C++, not C. You can write code which you cannot guess the machine code, as soon as you use any of the abstractions, just like C++.

Rust’s standard library is about on par with C’s, though.

Rust standard library is dramatically more useful than C’s. C doesn’t offer any kind of collections in its libraries. Every C project just grows its own differently broken hash maps and linked lists.

Compared to C++, Rust's libraries are severely anemic, especially in the areas where C++ is strong at such as collections, algorithms, and metaprogramming constructs such as type traits. Rust's standard library is better than C in certain areas–you identified one, which is dictionaries. (Linked lists are hard to provide a useful, performant API for; it's often better to roll your own–especially in C–than rely on a library to do it for you.) But even without including C's POSIX libraries, Rust seems to be missing things like random number generation. I general, yes, I would probably say that I would prefer Rust's standard library over C's, but it's not huge in any sense and much closer to C's than C++'s. In any case, I came into Rust thinking it would be like C++, and ergonomically it certainly is. But its standard library is nothing like C++'s and this caused me disconcertion until I began treating it like C's, and being happy whenever it provided me anything beyond that rather than disappointed whenever it was missing something I found useful.

Well yes, because LLVM generates the machine instructions

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