Name: Anonymous 2014-04-29 4:40
I've been working C++ professionally for a couple of years and honestly I'm a huge fan - So I was excited to read about an alternative. After reading your 5 posts, I get the impression that RUST is mostly mildly useful syntactic sugar on top of C++.
Here is my feedback:
1 - If memory management is a serious problem for the software you work on, I've never found the boost library lacking. This seems like the main selling point for RUST. Given the scope of the project: you guys must be doing something that is so different that it couldn't be rolled into a library - so I'm looking forward to your future posts to see if there is something here that I really am missing out on.
2 - I'm not a fan of the implicitness and I personally don't use 'auto' b/c it makes scanning code harder. I guess this is more of a personal preference.
3 - A lot of things are renamed. auto->let, new->box, switch->box You get the feeling that effort was put in to make the language explicitly look different from C++
4 - the Rust switch statement don't fall through... This one was truly mind blowing. The one useful feature of switch statement got ripped it out! If you don't really need the fall through, I'd just avoid using them completely...
5 - I've never really seen an equivalent to boost (in combination to the STL) in other languages (maybe I didn't look hard enough). Could you maybe make a post about the RUST standard library? Libraries are always the deal breaker
To that point, my last comment is maybe a little more wishy washy. The main reason I'm consistently happy with using C++ (and why I put up with the header files) is that everything is available. If you need to do X, and X has at some point been put into library by someone: you can be sure that that library will be available in C++. Since Rust seems so close to C++, does this mean that linking to C++ code is trivial? If I can seamlessly start programming parts of our codebase in RUST, that could potentially make a huge impact.
Here is my feedback:
1 - If memory management is a serious problem for the software you work on, I've never found the boost library lacking. This seems like the main selling point for RUST. Given the scope of the project: you guys must be doing something that is so different that it couldn't be rolled into a library - so I'm looking forward to your future posts to see if there is something here that I really am missing out on.
2 - I'm not a fan of the implicitness and I personally don't use 'auto' b/c it makes scanning code harder. I guess this is more of a personal preference.
3 - A lot of things are renamed. auto->let, new->box, switch->box You get the feeling that effort was put in to make the language explicitly look different from C++
4 - the Rust switch statement don't fall through... This one was truly mind blowing. The one useful feature of switch statement got ripped it out! If you don't really need the fall through, I'd just avoid using them completely...
5 - I've never really seen an equivalent to boost (in combination to the STL) in other languages (maybe I didn't look hard enough). Could you maybe make a post about the RUST standard library? Libraries are always the deal breaker
To that point, my last comment is maybe a little more wishy washy. The main reason I'm consistently happy with using C++ (and why I put up with the header files) is that everything is available. If you need to do X, and X has at some point been put into library by someone: you can be sure that that library will be available in C++. Since Rust seems so close to C++, does this mean that linking to C++ code is trivial? If I can seamlessly start programming parts of our codebase in RUST, that could potentially make a huge impact.