Sorry, I gave Rust a try

At the time of this writing, the up and coming programming language Rust wasn't for me. But I never say never.

There's a new language over at Mozilla (new as in I've only heard about it in the past year), called Rust.  I tried it. I don't like it.

I can't judge it based on the fact that I couldn't get what I thought was a simple program to compile. I also can't judge it that I tried it after trying (and falling in love with) Go.

It just doesn't sit well with me. I don't like strict languages. The thing that made me give it a shot even, is that it has generics, where Go doesn't.  But oh how I hate the syntax!!

Ths is all my opinion and personal preference, obviously. Give Rust a shot if you are reading this and are on the fence. It's interesting. It'll make you think. Just not what I want to think about.

I liked the way writing code in Node.js (and I wrote a fuck-tonne of it) made you think in terms of asynchronous, event driven code. It worked for me for a little while, until I hated not compiling code and finding simple problems at runtime. That's when I decided to give Go a shot. I love Go. I really really love the syntax. It made me think differently, in terms of concurrency, goroutines, and channels. That was an amazingly fun learning experience (I do have my degree in computer science, concurrency and parallel programming aren't new to me, but the Go concurrent model was not covered, or at least not well or not hammered into my brain). I just found two issues... No ability yet to dynamically link libraries, as everything created is a static executable or a static library. And no generics which it tried to solve with code generation.

It lead me to a discussion with a coworker. For all intents and purposes, syntax is arbitrary.  What I mean is that there are constructs that are in every language. There are packages, structures, loops, condition statements, evaluation, expressions, basic types, reference types, pointers, method overloading, etc...  What if you could try a "new language", or really what I mean is a compilation environment, or even runtime environment for interpreted languages, with the syntax from your favorite language?

It's easy if your favorite language is assembly, then you just write everything in assembly. But if you love Go and goroutines, you could use that instead of thread::spawn(), for example.

Ok, looking through Rust docs for what you would put goroutines in place of, I hate the syntax even more. Calling ".unwrap()" on everything, namespaces are no more than like 4 characters (std, sync, iter, str, cell, ffi, etc). There's double colons everywhere, &mut (wtf is that :P .. I know what it is, it's a flaw in that you have to tell Rust that you need mutability on the borrowed reference.

Maybe I have to get a book and hope a good set of examples comes along, rather than the standard fare bullcrap example apps that you'll find on a worthless Rust by example site. I hate those base barebones example sites. Show me real world problems and solutions. Then maybe I'll see what your language is good for...

Thanks.

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