I'm not sure if I agree that Rust crates overdo abstraction.
Coming from a Java world with heavy use of annotations and their behind the scenes magic I fear the Rust world that overuses macros.
Don't get me wrong. I understand that the way annotations work in Java is quite different from macros in Rust and you don't need to convince me that Rust macros are a ton better and cleaner and more useful while in a sense being even more lightweight.
I still dread a world with Rust becoming like Java where complicated and impenetrable magic is considered a virtue and not a sin. The main enabler to this is in my opinion is the overuse of macros, as wonderful and magical as might be.
I share this fear. Rust macros are _amazing_ and indispensable but their overuse makes understanding third party code extremely difficult. There are cases where macros are used to avoid repetition, I feel like code generation makes more sense here, where crates publish expanded syntax.
My other fear is the fragmentation of standard interfaces. AsyncRead and AsyncWrite are prime examples. If you build an http server you end up using tokio's AsyncRead AND futures AsyncRead - then a bunch of glue code to make them compatible with each other.
I'd love to see the standard library reinforced with crates that are basically default installs for their use cases. Tokio, futures, http, httpparse, maybe a variant of anyhow.
Much of futures' functionality is now in the standard library (core::future). Tokio is quite heavy, and I don't like it: smol is a better "futures standard library", in my opinion. There's async-compat if you need to interop with tokio, so I never have to write glue code (even if I'd rather not have a tokio runtime).
Had the same feeling browsing through the Haskell package collection. Felt like and almagamation of PhD theses, none of which were maintained after the author got his degree. Every single one a work of art, but most engeneered so badly that you would only use them begrudgingly.
My impression of Rust crates is that most are developed because a standardized solution to the problem didn't exist or didn't meet the author's needs, so they built their own. Many are well designed, but were never used by enough people to become truly usable or robust before they were abandoned.
It seems like outside certain problem domains, there isn't any effort to pool resources to keep projects alive. The few I did find were forks of forks where each subsequent maintainer stopped responding to proposed changes.
The article is okay, but the writing is bad chatgpt. Em-dashes in almost every sentence instead of commas. Out of place analogies and metaphors which barely make sense. Randomly sprinkled slang for an audience of teenage redditors.
If you care about endashes then you'll know that they're not supposed to be used to separate ideas in a sentence, that's what emdashes are for. That makes me think it's not LLM generated because LLMs know how to use emdashes.
I stopped using Rust because of this. I spent more time learning and cursing at other people’s abstractions versus thinking about what the computer is doing.
> the ones who’d use Zig if it weren’t allergic to syntactic sugar
You’re very close to understanding why some people prefer Zig. There is a correlation between language design and how things are built with it.
> And then you hit that moment – you're debugging, you hit "Go to Definition", and suddenly you're free falling through ten layers of traits, macros, and generics just to figure out how a buffer updates.
This isn't unique to Rust. I find exactly the same thing about C++. I will often have to wade through 8 layers of constructors to find where some field is set.
However, I wonder if the "Orphan Rule" makes it worse in Rust. It is not uncommon for you have to create a trivial "newtype" to wrap something because of the orphan rule. A couple of layers of that and you've got an impenetrable mess on your hands.
Personally I find it hard to read thirdparty code written in Rust, maybe because this language requires using traits and trait bounds, where an easier language like C++ can use templates with duck typing.
I find it easier to read code that uses Rust generics with trait bounds, since then I have a clear answer about what types it is generic over. Recently I was using a Thrust (CUDA library) function for the first time and I wanted to know what types, exactly, could be accepted as a parameter type to a callable. The docs¹ were not useful, since they only addressed the output type of the callable. I had to ask an LLM and then fact check its sources. This is a much less convenient experience than the information being mandatory in the function signature like in Rust.
C++ optimizes happy path - if you provide an expected type to a piece of template code, all works fine, but if not - you get terrible error messages. Rust requires more boilerplate on happy path, but provides useful hints in case of compilation errors.
This story reminds of Scala. The language as such is also fine, but has (had?) a cultural problem. There functional programming fundamentalists always promoting the purest solution without solid reasoning - as if god had decided that only pure functional programming is your ticket to paradise. In addition, Scala comes also with powerful language features to build abstractions, like traits, generics, and almost arbitrary names for classes, objects, and functions. All that lead to a culture of unreadably "try to be clever" code.
I'm not sure whether the Scala authors paved the way with methods like :\ (fold left) or whether that happened, because the language had the features, but I tend to assume the latter.
It is a great responsiblity of a language designer to think about what others might do with the language later. Regarding language features the rule "when in doubt, leave it out" applies. See Go (although not my favorite language).
This seems to be an antiquated view on Scala and the people working on it and it's tooling. Referring to :\ as foldLeft suggests the parent hasn't seen Scala code since 2018 and scalaz which is nowhere to be found nowadays. I've been working professionally with Scala since 2019 and have never come across the symbol soup that was scalaz.
Programming language choice is a matter of taste to a large degree so it's possible the different people value different traits of languages.
"When in doubt leave it out", is a design decision that can be taken to extremes in some cases and many of us feel crippled and don't enjoy such languages. There can be languages that provide powerful abstractions and rely on its users' trust to use them appropriately. Of coyrde, like every tool it can be misused but that should not be the baseline we use for comparison. Because surely we can find dreadful code in every language.
As a closing paragraph I'll just say that Scala 3 is very nicely designed language that simplifies a lot of the sticky point with Scala 2 and allows for a nice blend of OOP and functional programming. Functional programming in Scala is opt-in and progressive and is a good choice for greenfield projects on the JVM. Also a final note, tooling for Scala and Scala 3 specifically has improved a lot to the point where it just works without arcane invitations of the past. Overly confident opinions to the contrary for people who haven't touched the language since 2018, scala 2.11 and sbt 0.13 are quite out of touch.
I worked in Scala for a little bit and while it is mostly a fine language there are a couple huge problems; the big two off the top of my head are the return statement (legitimately the most wtf moment I've had learning a language???) and implicits (this one is more of a me problem but I really dislike implicits, both the variable passing in and the implicit constructors).
The article isn't wrong, but the focus on Rust is misleading. It isn't a Rust thing. It's a programmer thing, particular an open source programmer thing. Try looking at some of the Python libraries, like Spyne, that rely heavily on introspection some time. Or even React. JSX is accepted not, but at one time mixing HTML and Javascript sounded like a proposal to make a petroleum milkshake. It's happens in every language.
The C obstrufication contest makes an artform out of it. I think that's apt, and honest. Many open source projects are a form of art. People create to art say something about themselves. What better way so say how inventive you are, than to find a novel way to use the programming language?
I'm guilty of it myself. But once I got it out of my system and look back, I have to agree with the author. While these novel constructions are fun to create, that are pain in the arse for others to learn and even worse to maintain.
I don't think that Rust encourages it any more than any other language. The author should try looking at the sins Lisp's macro's and Python's meta classes enabled. Well, except for Rust's macro's. I suspect creative use of Rust's macro's would make the C obfuscation contest look like kindergarten artwork.
Readit News
Coming from a Java world with heavy use of annotations and their behind the scenes magic I fear the Rust world that overuses macros.
Don't get me wrong. I understand that the way annotations work in Java is quite different from macros in Rust and you don't need to convince me that Rust macros are a ton better and cleaner and more useful while in a sense being even more lightweight.
I still dread a world with Rust becoming like Java where complicated and impenetrable magic is considered a virtue and not a sin. The main enabler to this is in my opinion is the overuse of macros, as wonderful and magical as might be.
I share this fear. Rust macros are _amazing_ and indispensable but their overuse makes understanding third party code extremely difficult. There are cases where macros are used to avoid repetition, I feel like code generation makes more sense here, where crates publish expanded syntax.
My other fear is the fragmentation of standard interfaces. AsyncRead and AsyncWrite are prime examples. If you build an http server you end up using tokio's AsyncRead AND futures AsyncRead - then a bunch of glue code to make them compatible with each other.
I'd love to see the standard library reinforced with crates that are basically default installs for their use cases. Tokio, futures, http, httpparse, maybe a variant of anyhow.
However you will miss the STS tooling.
It seems like outside certain problem domains, there isn't any effort to pool resources to keep projects alive. The few I did find were forks of forks where each subsequent maintainer stopped responding to proposed changes.
Presumably the author is one of them. Or they simply use a text editing or blogging software that takes care of it.
E.g. Markdown with smarty-pants feature turned on generates them automatically from '--'. 'Em' dashes require '---'.
Coincidentally Rust's `cargo doc` does this for you -- just for example.
The conclusion that a text containing such micro-typographic niceties must be LLM-generated is a fallacy thusly.
Your other 'evidence' sounds like an interpretation to me. Maybe you should quote the sections you mean?
Otherwise your critique seems superficially limited to form, not contents -- an ad-hominem in disguise one may be tempted to conclude.
classic llmism
> the ones who’d use Zig if it weren’t allergic to syntactic sugar
You’re very close to understanding why some people prefer Zig. There is a correlation between language design and how things are built with it.
Deleted Comment
Precisely, same for Go. Incentives decide outcomes.
This isn't unique to Rust. I find exactly the same thing about C++. I will often have to wade through 8 layers of constructors to find where some field is set.
However, I wonder if the "Orphan Rule" makes it worse in Rust. It is not uncommon for you have to create a trivial "newtype" to wrap something because of the orphan rule. A couple of layers of that and you've got an impenetrable mess on your hands.
1: https://wmaxey.github.io/cccl/thrust/api/function_group__tra...
Programming language choice is a matter of taste to a large degree so it's possible the different people value different traits of languages.
"When in doubt leave it out", is a design decision that can be taken to extremes in some cases and many of us feel crippled and don't enjoy such languages. There can be languages that provide powerful abstractions and rely on its users' trust to use them appropriately. Of coyrde, like every tool it can be misused but that should not be the baseline we use for comparison. Because surely we can find dreadful code in every language.
As a closing paragraph I'll just say that Scala 3 is very nicely designed language that simplifies a lot of the sticky point with Scala 2 and allows for a nice blend of OOP and functional programming. Functional programming in Scala is opt-in and progressive and is a good choice for greenfield projects on the JVM. Also a final note, tooling for Scala and Scala 3 specifically has improved a lot to the point where it just works without arcane invitations of the past. Overly confident opinions to the contrary for people who haven't touched the language since 2018, scala 2.11 and sbt 0.13 are quite out of touch.
Metals and InteliJ still have issues with Scala 3, and Eclipse plugin is stuck in Scala 2.
The C obstrufication contest makes an artform out of it. I think that's apt, and honest. Many open source projects are a form of art. People create to art say something about themselves. What better way so say how inventive you are, than to find a novel way to use the programming language?
I'm guilty of it myself. But once I got it out of my system and look back, I have to agree with the author. While these novel constructions are fun to create, that are pain in the arse for others to learn and even worse to maintain.
I don't think that Rust encourages it any more than any other language. The author should try looking at the sins Lisp's macro's and Python's meta classes enabled. Well, except for Rust's macro's. I suspect creative use of Rust's macro's would make the C obfuscation contest look like kindergarten artwork.