Comment by hyperbrainer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hyperbrainer | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's hard to pinpoint the problem, because I love and adore Rust. So, thank you for all the work you have put in -- it's a great language.

I feel like my biggest struggle is simply how hard (tedious?) it is to properly work with generics and some more complex applications of traits. Any time I am working with (especially writing, somehow reading is easier) these, I always take an ungodly amount of time to do anything productive.

I am almost certainly sure this is a skill issue -- I am simply not "Rusting" like I am supposed to. Maybe I overuse generics, maybe I rely on traits too much, maybe I am trying to abstract stuff away too much. But this is one of the reasons I want to also explore other languages in the space, especially ones which make it impossible for me to make this so complex.

Don't get me wrong -- all of this complexity is a joy to work with when I can use my brain. But sometimes, it's just too much effort to do stuff, and it feels like I could be getting away with less. Curiously, I never had a problem with the borrow checker, even though people often complaining about how much it forces them to "stop and think".

Another thing is that C, for some weird reason, always feels "lower level" than Rust, and seeing it gives me some sort of weird satisfaction that Rust does not. Maybe it's just a greener grass syndrome, but wanted to mention it nonetheless.

All this said, I want to just emphasise, that despite this shortcoming (if it even is one), if I were forced to choose a language to spend the rest of my life with, I would not be the least bit sad to only ever use Rust again. I absolutely love it.

> I feel like my biggest struggle is simply how hard (tedious?) it is to properly work with generics and some more complex applications of traits. Any time I am working with (especially writing, somehow reading is easier) these, I always take an ungodly amount of time to do anything productive.

> Maybe I overuse generics, maybe I rely on traits too much, maybe I am trying to abstract stuff away too much.

Is this related to the problem where, if you want to put a generic in a data structure (e.g. an implementation of `Write`), you find yourself propagating a generic bound up an entire hierarchy of data structures and functions using those structures?

Asking because one thing that's common amongst Rust developers is a bit of an aversion to using `dyn Trait` types, and using a `Box<dyn Write>` (for instance) in the right place can wildly simplify your program.

> But sometimes, it's just too much effort to do stuff, and it feels like I could be getting away with less.

The next times you find this feeling arising, please feel free to reach out, if you'd like; I would genuinely love to hear about it. You can reach me by DM on the Rust Zulip, or by the email in my profile.

> Another thing is that C, for some weird reason, always feels "lower level" than Rust, and seeing it gives me some sort of weird satisfaction that Rust does not. Maybe it's just a greener grass syndrome, but wanted to mention it nonetheless.

I was originally a C developer, and I can sympathize. I don't tend to crave that "lower level" feeling often, but for me, there was something satisfying about C in the old DOS days, where you could make a pointer to video memory and scribble on it.

Okay this is really funny because I was messing about with generics relating to the Write trait just yesterday, leading to much frustration.

> you find yourself propagating a generic bound up an entire hierarchy of data structures and functions using those structures

And I did exactly that. I did eventually get around to using dyn Write, but that still gave me headaches because of how I cannot use impl Write as a result type in closures, which I need to do if I want to use tracing_subscriber::fmt::with_writer() and pass in these trait objects.

Despite being this close to the solution, I somehow again wound up propagating generics back at least four functions.

I ended up not writing any generic-based stuff and resigned to just manually writing each type's implementation out, but I am going to tinker with this again today. Hopefully, I can use your advice.

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. Means a lot!

> there was something satisfying about C in the old DOS days, where you could make a pointer to video memory and scribble on it

Exactly.

> I did eventually get around to using dyn Write, but that still gave me headaches because of how I cannot use impl Write as a result type in closures,

I hope we manage to fix that! We're working on making `impl Trait` usable everywhere a type works. I'll check where "return type of a closure" is on the `impl Trait` radar.

https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/213817-t-lan...

> which I need to do if I want to use tracing_subscriber::fmt::with_writer() and pass in these trait objects.

Would https://docs.rs/tracing-subscriber/0.3.19/tracing_subscriber... help you?

> Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. Means a lot!

Thank you as well for taking the time to fill in more details!

Wow, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I love all of you guys in the rust community.

> Would https://docs.rs/tracing-subscriber/0.3.19/tracing_subscriber... help you?

Indeed. This is brilliant.

I was just looking for something very similar, this is neat!

I think even moreso I can understand the sense of Rust feeling too large not because the language itself is, but because there are SO many of these neat tricks and little utility functions that are necessary to express what you want, and it's quite impossible to remember each and every one and how to go back and find them later.

The first thing the compiler tells after using dyn is, that the value is not object safe. Then you just got yourself another problem ;) With a lot of experience it becomes more obvious from the start what approach can work out, but with little knowledge, the compiler only sends you in circles and the great error messages tell you what you need to change to make the code compile, but usually pushes you in the direction you tried to avoid. I'm reasonably productive now, but it was bloody hard time to get there.

I never worked with low level languages except some university lession, but I think I have good general understanding how a CPU and memory works (just for some context)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com