I had some Scala 3 feelings when reading the vision, I hope Rust doesn't gets too pushy with type systems ideas.
That is how we end with other ecosystems doubling down in automatic memory management with a good enough ownership model for low level coding, e.g. Swift 6, OxCaml, Chapel, D, Linear Haskel, OCaml effects,...
Where the goal is that those features are to be used by experts, and everyone else stays on the confort zone.
Rust is fast tracking being as bad as c++ in terms of just garbage in it.
IMO the worst thing about c++ isn't that it is unsafe but it is extemely difficult to learn to a satisfying degree.
This is already kind of feels true for Rust and it will be surely true if people just keep shoving their amazing ideas into it.
IMO even async/tokio/error-handling aren't that well though out in rust. So much for keeping things out of the language.
Maybe Rust just wasn't what I wanted and I am salty about it but it feels a bit annoying when I see posts like this and considering where Rust is now after many years of shoving stuff into it
I remember adding lifetimes in some structs and then wanted to use generics and self pointing with lifetimes because that made sense, and then it didn't work because the composition of some features was not yet part of Rust.
Another thing: there are annotations for lifetimes in function signatures, but not inside the functions where there is a lot of magic happening that makes understanding them and working with them really hard: after finally the borrow checking gave me errors, that's when I just started to getting lots of lifetime errors, which were not shown before.
Rust should add these features but take out the old ones with guaranteed automatic update path.
That's actually the point. Many of these additions can be phrased as unifying existing features and allowing them to be used in previously unusable ways and contexts. There's basically no real increase in user-perceived complexity. The Rust editions system is a key enabler of this, and C++ has nothing comparable.
Beyond that, what the article shows is exactly what I want, I want as much type safety as possible especially for critical systems code which is increasingly what Rust is being used for.
Rust's development process is also design by committee, interestingly enough.
C++ is not cohesive at all
Geez I'd hate to be in rust dev shoes if I can't remove something later when I have a better better min/max. I guess this could be done off main, stable.
(I should note that of all of the features mentioned in this blog post, the only one I actually expect to see in Rust someday is pattern types, and that's largely because it partially exists already in unstable form to use for things like NonZeroU32.)
I find that CLI is a great way to model problems. When I find myself doing something that has graduated beyond a comfortable amount of PowerShell, Rust is there for me.
I have a template I've been evolving so it's super easy to get started with something new; I just copy the template and slam Copilot with some rough ideas on what I want and it works out.
https://github.com/teamdman/teamy-rust-cli
Just today used it to replace a GitHub stats readme svg generator thing that someone else made that was no longer working properly.
https://github.com/TeamDman/teamy-github-readme-stats
Decomposes the problem very nicely into incrementally achievable steps
1. `fetch <username>` to get info from github into a cache location 2. `generate <username> <output.svg>` to load stats and write an svg 3. `serve` to run a webserver to accept GET requests containing the username to do the above
Means that my stuff always has `--help` and `--version` behaviours too
A language’s type system doesn’t need to model every possible type of guarantee. It just needs to provide a type safe way to do 95% of things and force its users to conform to use the constructs it provides. Otherwise it becomes a buggy hodge podge of features that interact in poor and unpredictable ways. This is already the case in Scala; we’ve discovered almost 20 bugs in the compiler in the past year.
satvikpendem•3d ago
I truly do wish we get closer to Ada and even Lean in terms of safety, would be great to see all these theoretical type system features become reality. I use the `anodized` crate right now for refinement type features, and who knows, maybe we get full fledged dependent types too as there aren't many production languages with them and certainly not popular languages.