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Comment by emschwartz | Hacker News Reader

Depending on what language you're coming from, I think that's totally fair.

A part of Rust that I very much appreciate is that once you write Rust code and get it to compile, there's a pretty good chance that it's going to do what you expect. As someone who is new to Rust, it's definitely no small feat to get the code to compile in the first place. But I think that's one of the main things people tend to love once they get over the initial hump of grokking all the different ways of passing variables around.

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> But I think that's one of the main things people tend to love once they get over the initial hump of grokking all the different ways of passing variables around.

Agreed. I think the GP comment really underestimates how smooth Rust feels to Rust devs who have gotten over that hump. I've programmed in many languages and i confidently do not feel i am slower in Rust than other languages. Maybe not faster, but not slower in development speed.

But what i do get, for development speed, is the ability to solve large problems with many, many tools. I found this quite annoying in Go. In Rust, it's great. Complex problems are still complex, and Rust doesn't inherently simplify them - but it gives me the tools to come at problems in many ways. Which if you need it is invaluable.

I wonder if this is hurts testing culture with Rust. People think the compiler is magical enough they doing out a lot of energy into writing good tests still

IMO more than made up for by providing the tooling out of the box. It's easier to write your basic tests in Rust than it is in many languages because the Rust ecosystem already knows how to do unit testing and doc tests as supplied.

If you write comments with triple slashes, they're (Markdown format) documentation in Rust. If you use that Markdown to write an example of how to use something in your documentation, Rust's out of box tooling will assume that it should check your documented code works, by default. So you go from "I wrote an example in the source code of how to call my foo() function" to "I have basic HTML document for foo() and a test proving foo() basically works" in zero steps.

    /// Appends an element to the back of a collection.
    ///
    /// # Examples
    ///
    /// ```
    /// let mut vec = vec![1, 2];
    /// vec.push(3);
    /// assert_eq!(vec, [1, 2, 3]);
    /// ```

You still need functional tests in rust.

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