| > but I'm only talking about language complexity, in the strict syntactic, linguistic sense. Then again, on the strict syntactic sense, Rust is even less complex than C, because of the “most vexing parse” issue. If you wanted a rigorous analysis of the syntactic complexity, you could attempt to measure how difficult it is to write a lexer and a parser for every popular languages, and see how Rust performs. But given that the language grammar has been designed with parsing complexity in mind and have benefited from the hindsight of others before it, you'd be terribly disappointed. From this discussion, and many of your previous interventions on this forum, it's pretty clear, even though the reason isn't, that you have developed a resentment towards Rust and you can't help bashing it. Rust isn't a silver bullet, it has a fairly tough learning curve and as it tries to push the frontier of system programming language forward, it will take a few decisions that will ultimately be regarded as dead ends, and I have no doubt that future languages will avoids these pitfalls and provide improvement over the state of the art. In the meantime, spreading your hate with unsubstantiated judgements like “Rust is one of the 5 most complex programming language ever” or “Rust harm code reviews” isn't really constructive for anyone. Zig is a cool motorbike, Rust is a SUV. Arguing that your bike can indeed be safer than a SUV because you have more visibility and agility to avoid the danger is beyond childish. Super easy cross compilation and incredible development velocity on small-medium projects are super cool features of Zig, and Rust can't beat that. No need to downplay the importance of Rust for the software industry (and as a friendly reminder, Rust is making its way to the Linux kernel, with the approval of Linus because unlike C++ or Ada isn't too complex to his taste ;). |
Perhaps this may disappoint you, but I -- like many and perhaps most developers -- don't get such emotional responses, positive or negative to any programming language [1], which might appear as resentment to the emotionally attached. I am very impressed with some aspects of Rust, less impressed with others, and overall, my feelings toward it overall are shaped just like yours: by personal aesthetics. I don't find Rust's aesthetics very appealing and so Rust isn't my cup of tea (although I would't resent working in it because I'm not emotional toward languages and I currently program mostly in a language whose aesthetics I like even less than Rust's [2]), while you find them appealing and so you do like Rust. It's all just a matter of taste, and I fully accept that not everyone shares mine. I think your approach is too coloured by emotion, and is therefore unconstructive. You're a zealot, and you project that attitude on others, so "unconvinced" appears to you as a personal attack, and scepticism or dislike seems to you like bashing.
> Rust is even less complex than C, because of the “most vexing parse” issue. If you wanted a rigorous analysis of the syntactic complexity, you could attempt to measure how difficult it is to write a lexer and a parser for every popular languages, and see how Rust performs
No. The complexity of a formal language, like that of any set, is the computational complexity of deciding whether a string is in the language (so, including type-checking), not as the complexity of the parsing phase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theor...). I'm not saying this is the most useful way to talk about language complexity in this context (and caveats are needed, anyway, to make a more fine distinction between languages), but that is certainly one well-known way to talk about the intrinsic complexity of a language.
> Zig is a cool motorbike, Rust is a SUV. Arguing that your bike can indeed be safer than a SUV because you have more visibility and agility to avoid the danger is beyond childish.
It is beyond childish to make such inane statements about software correctness when you're clearly not very familiar with the subject, and are drawn to arguments like "more correctness => more soundness". The effect of language design on correctness is a complex subject with mostly unsatisfying answers, and even in software verification research, the debate over the value of soundness is far from settled (and not currently leaning toward more soundness). An equally inane statement would be, "Zig is like a modern aeroplane, relying on multiple levels of safety, some mechanical and some human, while Rust is like an old train that breaks down and kills everyone once there's a problem with the tracks." If we've learned anything about software correctness in the past decade it's that there is not much we can assume in advance, and that we don't really know one best way to improve it. It is true that some researchers think that the best answer to any correctness issue is more soundness in the language, but not only is this not a consensus opinion, I doubt it's even a majority opinion.
[1]: I would say I'm a "language sceptic." I'm generally sceptical toward any empirical claim about the bottom-line effectiveness of linguistic features without empirical support, and overall think that whatever empirical studies we do have show little impact overall to language design (comparing "reasonable" alternatives, at least), certainly compared to what all language fans claim. I would never, say, make a definitive claim like, "Zig yields more correct programs than Rust", or "Rust yields more correct programs than Zig," without clear empirical support (and my guess based on prior results would be that they're about the same).
[2]: C++