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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

Kind of a shame that the Rust crew doesn't seem to "get it" the way the Go team does. The Rust stdlib is TERRIBLE. Even basic stuff like file IO isn't implemented sanely. A shame as the language itself is pretty good, other than the idiotic semi-colon decision.

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It's a work in progress. We have not hit 1.0 yet.

Regarding the semicolon rules, you won't like this observation, but in my 3 years of writing Rust the semicolon rule has literally has never led to a single bug.

I get the feeling that your knowledge of the rules is not necessarily representative of typical post-1.0 developers. :-)

However, I don't recall it being a problem in my experimentation with Rust either.

In my case, it's not a problem with understanding them, it's a burning desire that they not exist.

You realize that it's a matter of aesthetics at best? You could set your editor of choice to substitute character ; with <pink elephant> when displaying code and back when saving it to disk. Have you tried this approach? (It's not an original idea - there is a plugin for Emacs which does exactly this for CamelCase - it displays parts of camel cased words as separate words. Helpful if you have looong camel cased name and are irritated because <back by word> and <forward by word> doesn't take you where you should be)

Not just aesthetics, it's also a matter of ergonomics. ; is not the most comfortable thing to type, requiring either wrist rotation or an awkwardly bent pinky.

Dvorak does it better -- underscore is on the home row.

That's odd, I consider ';' as one of the easiest things to type. What kind of keyboard are you on?

I'm a C++ developer and go so far as to make it harder. I map ; to <esc> in vim, and enter the actual char with a second ; (from from normal mode).

On the US keyboard it probably is. On Finnish keyboard it's where < is on the US one, i.e. Shift-comma.

Yeah, I always felt a tiny bit sorry for non-US developers, especially using languages like Perl that use $ all over the place.

> idiotic semi-colon decision

It's surprisingly logical and convenient. Everytime I `return null` (or just `null`) in CoffeeScript I wonder if Rust's way isn't beter.

The language itself is still evolving, I'm sure the stdlib is currently not a priority for them and that it will improve.

However, I hate semi colons so I agree with you there. You should check out the nimrod programming language.

The problem is that historically changing the stdlib in a significant way rarely happens once a language has moved out of the lab, do to the sheer amount of breakage that would ensue.

That is not a worry for Rust. At this stage we make breaking changes to the standard library nearly every day. Sometimes on an hourly basis.

Revamping I/O is very high on the list. Brian Anderson et al are working on it as we speak.

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