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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

I think Rust is "higher level" than C or Zig in the sense that there are most abstractions than C or Zig. Its not Javascript, but it is possible to program Rust without worrying too much about low level concerns.

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> in the sense that there are most abstractions

is it a typo for more abstractions? or is there some different meaning?

yes its a typo

Except if you need to expose or consume a C API, or you need to use some obscure performance improvement.

Fuck it, by that logic C and Python are the same language.

Which is still a crazy claim considering Rust is often told about having strong bureaucracy around even sharing variables (borrow checker).

The languages trade complexity in different areas. Rust tries to prevent a class of problems that appear in almost all languages (i.e two threads mutating the same piece of data at the same time) via a strict type system and borrow checker. Zig won't do any of that but will force you to think about the allocator that you're using, when you need to free memory, the exact composition of your data structures, etc. Depending on the kind of programmer you are you may find one of these more difficult to work with than the other.

There are some cases in Rust where the borrow checker rejects valid programs, in those cases it may be because of a certain data structure in which case you probably have many crates available to solve the issue, or you can solve it yourself with boxing, cloning, or whatever. The vast majority of the time (imo) the borrow checker is just checking invariants you have to otherwise hold and maintain in your head, which is harder and more error prone.

The actual hard part of Rust is dealing with async, especially when building libraries. But thats the cost of a zero-cost async abstraction I suppose.

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