Have you tried Ada?

What are the specific aesthetic complaints here?

In my limited rust experience, I’ve found that it does a pretty good job of using the ugliness of something like an explicit lifetime to signal to the developer and reader that the code is doing something complicated and non-obvious. Like “here’s a part where the types logic required more help than what the compiler could figure out on its own; here be dragons.”

In that way the “ugliness” is really just a manifestation of “hard things possible” and the language not hiding the underlying realities from you.

I’d suggest reading their (free, online) book if you haven’t already, that’s what motivated me to actually try using it. It sells its core features pretty well and eased me into it better than just trying to grok the syntax. What kept me using it is how annoyingly frequently my code would _just work_ once I got it compiling, which I could often get to pretty quickly by catching errors early with a linter. I’d highly recommend giving it an honest try, the aesthetics make sense with a minimal amount of experience.

I see this complaint all the time about Rust, and it always confuses me because it doesn't match my experience at all. Do you have an example of Rust syntax that is more complicated than complicated C++?

It’s sad you are getting downvoted for simply expressing what seems to be a genuine opinion.

I once had a boss that used to really hate python. He would roll his eyes whenever it was brought up. He was CTO of the company and he would sneer at it. One day, in a one-to-one meeting, I asked him, "what is so bad about python?"

I expected him to explain some core deficiencies: problems regarding the module system or multi-threading limitations, or some pathological case where latency spikes... and he said "I don't like the whitespace."

I never took him seriously again and left that company shortly after.

It’s wild that this is downvoted.

Converting all C++ code to Rust while actually getting a safety improvement is not possible because Rust does not safely support all of the things folks do in C++ (complex cyclic object graphs with inscrutable logic deciding lifetimes, intentional races, etc).

It’s easy to think that all of those “bad” things that C++ programmers do should somehow not have been done. It’s more likely that it’s either not possible to do it any other way or that you get a worse outcome if you do it another way. The cyclic nature of compiler IRs comes to mind. As do the wacky relationships between objects in games. Complex uses of syscall ABI are another. Oh and dynamic linking. Likely there are many other examples.

The idea that an LLM would convert C to Rust without introducing a slew of problems along the way is especially juvenile. Most likely the LLM with either use the unsafe subset of Rust, or produce Rust code that doesn’t actually match the functionality of the C code (but declare premature victory thinking that it did).

I don’t consider Rust beautiful, but after a decade of working with Rust I am no longer bothered by its aesthetic warts.

Examples?