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Comment by K0nserv | Hacker News Reader

> That's why so many useful things start with a single person or *a very small team*,

You subtly shifted the goal posts here. But even if you start out with a single person you eventually have to have new maintainers, if only because of human mortality. Software is a young field so we haven't had to contend much with this fact yet, but it's inevitable.

Personally I think something like Rust is helpful for large solo programs too, keeping everything in your head past 10kCLOC is hard so why not have a language and compiler that helps you?

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My personal opinion is that Rust is a bit too lengthy to keep everything in your head. For a solo program, I'd probably go with Python first, just because it tends to produce very short and yet readable source code.

And yes, I shifted the goal post a bit by assuming the team to be medium to large in size. If I assume a very small team like the initial Photoshop release with 2 people closely working together every day, then I think their communication will be so good that there aren't "many things that make working on team code dangerous" left. So in that case, I wouldn't expect much benefit from using Rust.

> My personal opinion is that Rust is a bit too lengthy to keep everything in your head

I'm curious what you mean by "lengthy" here. The reason I say Rust lets me keep fewer things in my head is because something like this in C:

    struct Bar {};
    
    struct Foo {
        struct Bar *bar;
    };

where it's no clear if Foo owns Bar or merely outlives it, becomes

    struct Bar;
    struct Foo<'b> {
        bar: &'b Bar,
    }

in Rust and I no longer have to keep this information in my head.

Interesting, it's mostly concepts and architecture in my head, and less lines of code.

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