Tone and criticism

21 December 2011

So, I worry that my various posts about Rust give the impression that I’m dissatisfied with the language. It’s true that there are several things I’d like to change—and those are what I’ve focused on—but I want to clarify that I quite like Rust the way it is and I find the overall feel of the language to be very good. When it comes to the big decisions, I think Rust gets it right:

  • Low-level control over how data is laid out in memory, but high-level, expressive types like vectors, tuples, variadic types, lightweight closures
  • Ability to use the stack, but safely:
    • Locals can be allocated on the stack
    • Blocks that directly reference the stack that created them but do not leak
  • Unique pointers for messaging (and possibly other things)
  • Immutable by default but mutable when desired
  • Static bindings for most calls
  • Lightweight tasks with cheap, growable stacks
  • A focus on type safety, and particularly on using types to achieve goals beyond detecting typos, such as data-race freedom or exhaustiveness checking

None of these features are unique to Rust, but the combination is new, and it’s powerful. There are also plenty of small decisions I think are fantastic:

  • Crate files (an idea whose time had come) and the generally simple command lines to invoke the compiler
  • Syntax: at first I thought fn and ret were overly terse, but after working with them writing out return just seems so ponderous. Similarly, parentheses-free syntax for if is surprisingly pleasant.
  • Unsigned types without implicit conversions

I could go on but I guess that’s enough. Anyway I think my point is that I think Rust has the big picture down pat. I would like to tweak how it achieves some of those goals but even if my ideas never make it or turn out to be flawed (as some of them no doubt are), Rust’ll be a very nice language to use.