Early thoughts on Rust

[kpreid]

I've now been programming in Rust for over a month (since the end of July). Some thoughts:

• It feels a lot like Haskell. Of course, Rust has no mechanism for enforcing/preferring lack of side effects, but the memory management, which avoids using a garbage collection algorithm in favor of statically analyzable object lifetimes, gives a very similar feeling of being a force which shapes every aspect of your program. Instead of having to figure out how to, at any given code location, fit all the information you want to preserve for the future into a return value, you instead get to store it somewhere with a plain old side effect, but you have to prove that that side effect won't conflict with anything else.

  And, of course, there are algebraic data types and type classes, er, traits.

• It's nice to be, for once, living in a world where there's a library for everything and you can just use them by declaring a dependency on them and recompiling. Of course, there's risks here (unvetted code, library might be doing unsound unsafe, unmaintained libraries you get entangled with), but I haven't had a chance to have this experience at all before.

• The standard library design sure is a fan of short names like we're back in the age of “linker only recognizes 8 characters of symbol name”. I don't mind too much, and if it helps win over C programmers, I'm all in favor.

• They (mostly) solved the method chaining problem! (This got long, so it's another post.)