[EugeneOZ]

Quote: "Rust's borrow checker is a wonderful thing that forces you into designing code to be more robust. But as it is so unlike anything you're used to, it takes time to develop a certain knack to work with it efficiently."

I don't think it's description of an issue.

[ZenoArrow]

>"I don't think it's description of an issue."

It is if it drives potential community members away.

[mmstick]

No one's being driven away. Only people who had no intention on trying Rust are complaining about it.

[ZenoArrow]

There's plenty of comments about it in the Rust subreddit, coming from people who have tried it.

Look, it's not an issue for all time, there are plans to improve it, I'm just suggesting it as a point of friction right now. If you seriously don't think it's an issue, what would you say are the issues? You won't do yourself any favours if you try to pretend Rust is perfect.

[mmstick]

I've been writing software exclusively in Rust since the 1.0 release. I have no issues with the borrow checker, personally. I haven't seen the borrow checker mentioned as an issue on the Rust subreddit, which I frequent.

The only people who have issues are people who've used Rust for less than a week and still do not understand the basic rules of the borrow checker. I've explained it many times to people already. Once you know the rules, it's easy peasy, and you'll never have another complaint from the borrow checker ever again.

The only improvements that I could see for Rust is landing non-lexical borrows, macros 2.0, and faster compile times, albeit compile times are largely fixed now. A 100K combined LoC project can easily compile a release build using 1 core in 3 minutes or less.

[burntsushi]

It took me quite a bit longer than a week to completely internalize the borrow checker. Probably closer to a small number of months. I still sometimes run into problems, but I have enough experience now to know what the space of solutions looks like.

Let's be careful not to overstate Rust's benefits and understate Rust's costs. Of course, I do happen to think the benefits are overwhelming compared to the costs. :-)

[EugeneOZ]

Borrow checker learning curve is an issue, of course. But not checker itself.

[ZenoArrow]

You do realise you've wasted both my time and your own. If you thought about it from the start, it's obvious that I was referring to the learning curve. All facets of all Turing-complete languages are useful once you've overcome the learning curve. What varies is the length of time needed before you become proficient in using it. For another example...

The learning curve for manual memory management in C is a major issue, but not the principal of manual memory management itself.

[EugeneOZ]

No, I think I made important distinction. There can be issue with technology and there can be issue with learning curve.