Why is Rust in such a rush to hit 1.0? Recent improvements have massively improved it, but I'm afraid it will lock too soon and suffer for it.
Rust holds some promise for me, but things like simple buffer manipulation, strings, and slices are ugly and torturous in Rust, compared to Go where they are a pleasure to work with.
You are barking up the wrong tree if you are waiting for Go-level simplicity, like the Rust folks have often said.
String would never allocate more than it does currently, but it would do it in less predictable situations which some people probably wouldn't like. However, it would basically allow people who don't care that much about short strings to completely eschew all the .as_slice()s and .to_string()s that are currently ubiquitous in any rust string handling.
That used to be the purpose of MaybeOwned, which was just replaced by CowString (a typedef of Cow to String and str).
On Cow, a deref returns an immutable slice (with no copy) so slice methods can be called directly on the CowString, `to_mut` copies the source data if necessary and returns a mutable ref, and `into_owned` copies the source data if necessary and returns it.
So if you don't really care what you get and whether it's going to be copied or whatever, ask for a CowString and go to town.
> if String could point to either &'static str or an owned buffer
http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/09/15/Rust-1.0.html
The things you've mentioned as torturous are mostly sugar on-top of the already implemented primitives, and are even being worked on ([n..m] slice notation, to name one).
Almost: it will compile on all future Rust releases to the end of time (unless Rust wants to commit suicide). Languages cannot ever make breaking changes once they reach a stable version (unless they have relatively little adoption). This is even more crucial for "low level" languages like Rust, as they are often used for projects that are meant to last for decades, and are often chosen by programmers who want don't have the patience for this kind of thing.
Or nobody expects anything from them (see: PHP)
The time for 1.0 is not now, IMO, but it is soon. At some point you just have to cross your fingers and launch, and learn to live with whatever mistakes you may have made. Experience has shown that the language is good enough in most respects, so even if they flub the last-minute things it won't be any worse than what any other brand-new language has had to live with.
Sure, but I feel like Haskell is the same thing only more so. And the invariants you keep track of - does this function access the database? could this function error? which audit events might happen in this codepath? - are IMO more useful than in Rust, where you spend the same effort tracking memory ownership. Which, sure, if you need it better to have a compiler that can help you with it, but getting good performance without it is easier than many people seem to think.