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0 pointsJoshTriplett4mo ago0 comments

> Rust is the final language.

> Defect free.

I am an upstream developer on the Rust Project (lang, library, cargo, others), and obviously a big fan of Rust. This kind of advocacy doesn't help us, and in fact makes our jobs harder, because for some people this kind of advocacy is their main experience of people they assume are representative of Rust. Please take it down a notch.

I think Rust is the best available language for many kinds of problems. Not yet all, but we're always improving it to try to work for more people. It gets better over time. I'd certainly never call it, or almost any other software, "defect free".

And I'd never call it "the final language"; we're building it to last the test of time, and we hope things like the edition system mean that the successor to Rust is a future version of Rust, but things can always change, and we're not the only source of great ideas.

If you genuinely care about Rust, please adjust your advocacy of Rust to avoid hurting Rust and generating negative perceptions of Rust.

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6 comments · 4 top-level

josephg4mo ago· 2 in thread

I’d also add: as a lover of forward progress, I really hope rust isn’t the last good idea programming language designers have. I love rust. But there are dozens of things I find a bit frustrating. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m clever & motivated enough to write a whole new language to try to improve it. But I really hope someone else is!

For a taste: I wish we didn’t need lifetime annotations, somehow. I wish rust had first class support for self borrows, possibly via explicit syntax indicating that a variable is borrowed, and thus pinned. Unpin breaks my brain, and I wish there were ways to do pin projections without getting a PhD first. I wish for async streams. I wish async executors were in std, and didn’t take so long to compile. I could go on and on.

I feel like there’s an even simpler & more beautiful language hiding inside rust. I can’t quite see it. But I really hope someone else can bring it into the world some day.

JoshTriplettOP4mo ago

> For a taste: I wish we didn’t need lifetime annotations, somehow. I wish rust had first class support for self borrows, possibly via explicit syntax indicating that a variable is borrowed, and thus pinned. Unpin breaks my brain, and I wish there were ways to do pin projections without getting a PhD first. I wish for async streams. I wish async executors were in std, and didn’t take so long to compile. I could go on and on.

I would like all of that as well. I think we can do much of that in Rust. I would love to see self-borrows available, and not just via pinning; I would also like relative pointers. I would like people to almost never have to think about pin or unpin; one of my rules of thumb is that if you see Pin or Poll, you've delved too deep, and nobody should need those to write almost any async code, including the interiors of trait implementations and async runtime implementations. And I would absolutely like to see async iterators, async executors, and many kinds of async traits in the standard library.

I also think there are plenty of things we are unlikely to get to even in an edition, and that might never happen without a completely different language. I'm not sure if we'll find a path to doing those in Rust, or if they will be the domain of some future language that makes different trade-offs.

josephg4mo ago

> I also think there are plenty of things we are unlikely to get to even in an edition, and that might never happen without a completely different language.

Yes, this is my feeling too. All programming languages - perhaps, all computer programs - must decide how malleable they should be. Fast moving systems are exciting, but they're very annoying to use, or build on top of. I think generally we want a very slow moving language for infrastructure software, like databases or the linux kernel. Slow moving languages are often good for users, because they don't need to learn new things or rewrite existing software. (I think thats one of the reasons python3 was so poorly received.)

It might be too late for large changes in rust. This a sign of maturity, but its also a little bit sad. I want all those features you mention too.

Some day. Maybe LLMs will help somehow. Rust is, thankfully, not the last programming language humans will invent.

echelon4mo ago

I'm sorry my autistic elation for Rust is perceived as being over the top, but I truly do mean everything I say. I could have articulated it in a less saccharine tone.

> > Defect free.

There's a Google talk on the matter. "Defect rate" / "defect free" is a term that is used quite a bit. I've latched onto this, because I find it true. Rust is a far more defect free language on a line by line basis measured and compared to other statically typed languages.

> And I'd never call it "the final language"

I honestly disagree, and I'm sticking to this prediction.

I don't think we're going to be writing code much longer by ourselves. The machines are going to outpace us soon.

Maybe something that's LLM-oriented will take over, but at that point these won't be "human" languages anymore. So I'll revise my claim to "Rust is the last human language".

If I want to serialize my thoughts to code, Rust is the language for it. It's probably the last one I'll be hand-writing or sending my revisions back to the LLM for.

Rust will also be an order of magnitude easier to author, at which point there shouldn't be much holding people back from producing it. If you have a choice between generating Java, C++, Go, or Rust, you're going to pick Rust almost every time unless you have to fit into those other ecosystems.

If you haven't used Claude or Codex with Rust, it's sublime and you should drop what you're doing to try it.

estebank4mo ago

As a member of t-compiler, seconded.

jacquesm4mo ago

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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