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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Rust pissed me off until I stopped fighting it. When I finally gave up and started doing things its way, it became a lot more fun. And `cargo clippy` is flat-out helpful for learning Rust’s idioms.

While I’m not yet out to rewrite all the things in Rust, I understand the appeal of rebooting archaeological projects with a modern approach.

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The thing is, I just don’t want to write programs the way Rust wants me to. Among statically typed languages, Java is the closest to what I want to use but my true love is Common Lisp. With the arrival of Coalton, I can get the best of both worlds: a type system with nice properties for the rare program that would benefit from them and CL for the majority of programs.

Then I guess you don't have to write Rust? It seems like it doesn't solve any new problems for you so don't feel forced or pressured to use it (for any technology, really), and I say this as someone who really likes and uses Rust.

Yeah, what’s frustrating is (a) I wanted to like it; (b) it’s taking up a lot of the job market relative to other alternative languages I’d rather use; and (c) I like the language Graydon describes as “the language I wanted” https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html

Seems like you want something like OCaml then.

So, the reason Rust took the direction it did is that a lot of people want a language specifically like this, while there were already plenty of languages roughly in the ballpark Graydon wanted. I don't have a clear use for one of those languages, I might use it in some cases anyway, but I was compelled by Rust, it's more or less exactly what I needed.

I can have a proper type system like an ML, and touch the metal like C? Yes please.

B is exactly how I've felt about, in order: C, C++, Java, C#, Javascript. I spent almost 20 years writing languages I did not like because I couldn't find jobs in anything else.

Rust saved some of us from a lifetime of exactly the problems you have with Rust, maybe let us have this one :)

Alright, so when I’m appointed Lord Emperor, we’ll all be writing CL. Until then, I’m digging Rust. It’s like garbage collection, but where you can always tell exactly when a thing is going to be collected.

Unless you happen to be using something like Rust/WinRT and to avoid the usual stop the world cascade deletion when smart pointers in a complex data structure all reach 0, have a background thread collecting those smart pointers.

There’s no plausible scenario in which I’d ever write a single line of Rust/WinRT.

Doesn't change the fact it isn't always obvious.

Yeah, there’s enough ways that rust makes really tedious choices in generics, type system stuff, and its particular flavors of affine memory as a resource logic that I’m considering building my own wee language.

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