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Stop making me memorize the borrow checker

(erikmcclure.com)
177 points signa11 | 3 comments | 16 Nov 24 23:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.707s | source
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troad ◴[17 Nov 24 01:04 UTC] No.42161064[source]▶
I think it's telling that whenever someone raises concerns about any element of Rust, no matter how constructively, they're always met with a wall of "you must not truly get the borrow checker," or "you're using Rust wrong," or "stop trying to write <C/C++/Java/etc> in Rust!", usually with zero evidence that that is in fact what is happening. There's never anything to improve on Rust, it's always user error / a skill issue. If there ever surfaces any audio of Linus Torvalds and Ken Thompson discussing the pros and cons of the borrow checker, I expect a sea of patronising anime avatars to show up, seeking to explain Rust's invention of the concept of ownership to them.

Rust is really nifty, but there are still (many) things that could be improved in Rust, and we'd all benefit from more competition in this space, including Rust! This is not a zero sum game.

Honestly, I also think many people just want a nice ML-like with a good packaging story, and just put up with the borrow checker to get friendly C-like syntax for the Option monad, sum types with exhaustive matching, etc. This is a use case that could very much benefit from a competitor with a more conventional memory model.

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1. kstrauser ◴[17 Nov 24 01:37 UTC] No.42161255[source]▶
I am A-OK with someone not liking Rust. I do, but it’s still only my 3rd-most used language behind the Python and TypeScript I write at work.

It’s just that time after time I’ve heard people criticize Rust because they were, in fact, trying to write their pet language in Rust. It’s similar to how many complaints I’ve heard about Python because “it’s weakly typed”. What? Feel free not to like either of them, but make it for the right reasons, not because of a misunderstanding of how they work.

Now, the author of this post may be doing everything right and Rust just isn’t good at the things they want to use it for. The complaint about constantly bumping against the borrow checker leads me to wonder.

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2. troad ◴[17 Nov 24 02:08 UTC] No.42161390[source]▶
> It’s similar to how many complaints I’ve heard about Python because “it’s weakly typed”. What? Feel free not to like either of them, but make it for the right reasons, not because of a misunderstanding of how they work.

Are you sure you're not just being harsh to people whose grasp of CS vocab is weaker than yours? If someone tells me that Python is 'weakly typed', I translate it in my head to 'dynamically typed', and the rest of their complaint generally makes sense to me, in that the speaker presumably prefers static typing. Which is a valid opinion to hold, not necessarily the result of any misunderstanding.

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3. kstrauser ◴[17 Nov 24 02:19 UTC] No.42161462[source]▶
Reasonably sure. If it’s clear they actually mean dynamically typed, fine. That’s down to preference, and I won’t say they’re wrong any more than I’ll argue that chocolate is better than strawberry.

However, I’ve heard lots of utterly wrong criticisms of Python (and Rust and…) that were based on factual misunderstandings and not just a vocabulary mistake.