Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

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Agreed about magic.

Please correct me if I’m misunderstanding this, but something that surprised me about Rust was how there wasn’t a guaranteed “paper trail” for symbols found in a file. Like in TypeScript or Python, if I see “Foo” I should 100% expect to see “Foo” either defined or imported in that specific file. So I can always just “walk the paper trail” to understand where something comes from.

Or I think there was also a concept of a preamble import? Where just by importing it, built-ins and/or other things would gain additional associated functions or whatnot.

In general I just really don’t like the “magic” of things being within scope or added to other things in a manner that it’s not obvious.

(I’d love to learn that I’m just doing it wrong and none of this is actually how it works in Rust)

It’s a bit confusing sometimes with macros that create types that don’t seem to exist. But usually when I work with code I use an IDE anyway and “go to definition” will bring me to where it’s defined, even when it’s via a macro.

Still generally prefer the plain non-macro declarations for structs and enums though because I can easily read them at a glance, unlike when “go to definition” brings me to some macro thing.

Doesn't something like the following break the trail in pretty much all languages?

    from package import *

Yup. And I’ve not seen that used in forever and it’s often considered a linting error because it is so nasty.

So maybe what I’m remembering about Rust was just seeing a possible but bad convention that’s not really used much.

You can import everything from a module with a *, but most people seem to prefer to import things explicitly. But, yes, you can generally figure out easily where things are coming from!

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