The point is that dealing with the Rust borrow checker is a huge pain in the ass and for most Rust applications you would have been better off just using a garbage collected language.
Maybe if you structure your code weirdly? I haven't encountered a major borrow checker issue that I couldn't easily resolve in many years.
“You are just not holding it right.”
Rust borrow checker indeed does force you to make contorsion to keep it happy and will bite you if you fail to take its particularity into account. It’s all fine and proper if you think the trade-off regarding safety is worth it (and I think it is in some case) but pretending that’s not the case is just intentionally deluding yourself.
The people here implying that the BC forces you to use a good architecture are also deluding themselves by the way. It forces you to use an architecture that suits the limitations of the borrow checker. That’s pretty much it.
The fact that such delusions are so prevalent amongst part of the community is from my perspective the worst part of using Rust. The language itself is very much fine.
> Rust is definitely hard, but after a while it's fine and you kind of get how even if using another language you still have to think about memory.
That kind of comment is a typical exemple. It’s not that you have to think about memory. You have to understand the exact limitations of the analyser Rust uses to guarantee memory safety. I don’t understand why it’s so hard to accept for some part of the Rust community.
And as the other commenter said, the borrow checker isn't all that hard to satisfy. BC complaints are often related to serious memory handling bugs. So if you know how to solve such bugs (which you need to know with C or C++ anyway), BC won't frustrate you. You may occasionally face some issues that are hard to solve under the constraints of the BC. But you can handle them by moving the safety checks from compile-time to runtime (using RefCell, Mutex, etc) or handle it manually (using unsafe) if you know what you're doing.
Like the other commenter, I find some of the complaints about programming friction and refactor to be exaggerated very often. That's unfair towards Rust in that it hurts its adoption.
The problem is most of the important problems you deal with while programming require heap allocations: i.e. a lot of Rust advice is liable to lead you astray trying to find over-complicated solutions to optimizations you probably don't need up front.
So in terms of systems programming, Rust is technically good here - these are all things you'd like to do on low level code. On the other hand if you're making a bunch of web requests and manipulating some big infrequently used data in memory...Box'ing everything with Arc is probably exactly what you should do, but everyone will tell you to try not to do it (and the issue is, if you're like me, you're coding in the "figure out what and how to do it" phase not the "I have a design I will implement optimally" phase).
If you come into Rust thinking you're going to write doubly-linked lists all day and want to structure everything like that, you're going to have a bad time.
But then in python you run into stuff like:
```
def func(list = []):
list.append(1)
and list is actually a singleton. You want to pull your hair out since this is practically impossible to hunt down in a big codebase.
Rust is just different, and instead of writing double-pointer code, you just use flat structures, `Copy` keys, and `loop {}` and move on with your life.
use linters, they keep getting smarter
Because in both forums I keep coming back to edits, and it takes forever to edit some of the things, manually. I feel like I'm being stupid or the UX of all of that is just so terrible.
I use Firefox + Tridactyl + the native extension, so with the cursor in any text field I can hit Ctrl+i and it pops up a gvim window with the contents of that text field. When you save+quit, it copies the contents back into the field.
So glad someone figured out how to do this again once Vimperator died.
sed s/^/ /1. Copy code to clipboard.
2. From a shell prompt on macOS,
pbpaste | sed 's/^/ /' | pbcopy
wl-paste | sed 's/^/ /' | wl-copy
xclip -o -se c | sed 's/^/ /' | xclip -se c
Get-Clipboard | % { $_ -replace '^',' ' } | Set-Clipboard
I've been typing out "-selection clipboard" this whole time!
As for the example... yeah, Python is pretty terrible (for writing production codebases, I think its a great language for short-lived, one-person projects). Interesting that you mention Python because if you're considering Python and Rust for the same use case that's pretty bonkers, for anything that you might possibly have used Python to do there are many more natural choices than Rust. If you wouldn't have done it in C/C++ ten years ago, you probably shouldn't be doing it in Rust today.
I want to eventually join the "50 engines for every game" race that is rust gsme engineer development, but I'm sure not going to have the fast iteration part of design be done in Rust. The renderer and all the managers should be absolutely solid, but some parts of games need you to break stuff quickly.