I recently started looking at Rust. I somehow had this idea in my head that it was a weird language, but up close, it is quite a friendly beast. Interesting, though.
Managing lifetimes is hard to reason about (though this is not a problem with Rust, but with lifetimes... Rust just makes it explicit.)
As soon as you start using generics things can quickly get out of control. Here's one of my function signatures:
pub fn xor_together<'a, 'b, 'r, A, B, R, T, U>(iter_a: T, iter_b: U) -> Map<'r, (&'a A, &'b B), R, Zip<T, U>>
where A: BitXor<B, R>,
T: Iterator<&'a A>,
U: Iterator<&'b B>
Some other weird things include closures. There are several types of closures, not interchangeable with each other (nor with fn) and honestly I don't understand them (and couldn't find docs to explain them). I hope this changes as Rust stabilizes.
I'm loving it so far, but boy... how hard it is.
I am no stranger to pre-1.0 languages, I have worked with lots of them, but none have been as frustrating (or interesting) as Rust... the question as to will Rust grow into a production language or an academic toy still remains an open one in my book.
Reserving judgement until 1.0 is out.
We do and we will. It's one of the reason there's such churn right now: we can't keep doing that post 1.0.
Well, PHP is forced upon me by my ISP and I never bothered to change.