Comment by mdtusz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdtusz | Hacker News Reader

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I'm curious why you think it's too big to master. There's certainly a lot to the language, but it's design means that these various facets are largely contained to their area of effect. I'd be confident in the assertion that most rust developers don't need to understand much more than the basics of the type system, traits, lifetimes, and the surface levels of async.

The biggest benefit to the language is precisely that all the Lego pieces fit together and you simply don't need to worry about (in Lego parlance) "illegal moves". Whenever I write C or C++, I'm constantly worrying about whether or not I'm doing something incorrectly and potentially writing dangerous code. In rust, this mostly disappears and you can focus on the actual problem domain you're working in rather than computer science problems.

> I'm curious why you think it's too big to master.

Many of us do find Rust very hard to get to grips with, however much we're informed by Rust advocates that it isn't! I don't know if there's any readily available way to be objective about this? I think all we have is attestation. Here's Chris Keathley (of some Elixir fame):

> I've written a non-trivial amount of Rust code (50-100k lines) .. and I feel like I barely understand Rust as a language

I don't think that's an uncommon perspective.

It's entirely reasonable to have trouble getting to grips with Rust, as ownership and borrowing are quite different paradigms compared to the usual mainstream languages that people tend to know. But there's no way to write "50k lines" of Rust without saying that you understand the language, so I'm baffled by what the author is trying to imply there. If you don't understand the language, then you won't even make it to 1k lines.

I didn't find anything tricky about the ownership model. The last two languages I learned were Clojure then Elixir, both of which had far more concepts novel to me (with no experience in Lisps nor functional languages), yet neither gave me the trouble Rust has.

Frankly your response is typical of the smugness I find with Rust advocates. You 'know' Rust isn't complex (perhaps because of your own experience). When people say they find it so, you consider it your role to inform them about how they are mistaken about their own experience.

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