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by moldavi 1642 days ago
I'm also curious about the architectural consequences of Rust. It seems to force us into a very procedural or functional style, and sometimes makes us use parallel collections for things in a way reminiscent of relational databases... which is often a good thing, but not always. I'd love to read others' opinions on the topic.
2 comments

One of the things I valued in the C++ community is the idea of expressing underlying complexity more explicitly through language / API constructs to help steer people in the right direction (Pit of Success type of stuff). I feel like Rust is taking that further and helping show how nasty most of our GUI (at least) architectures are.

I eagerly watch the progress of GUIs and other architectural work in Rust because they are helping to raise the popularity of solutions we've been ignoring because things have been "good enough".

React and Polymer seemed like an okay balance of of OO and functional... are our current GUI architectures really that nasty?
I'm speaking of more traditional GUI architecture where everything is a bidirectional graph of statically defined widgets. From my understanding, Elm and react style GUIs are some of the models people are looking to in Rust.
GUI in Rust specifically is very unpleasant, from my limited experience.
Rust is just a (pretty opinionated) tool. When it works, it really works, and the architecture rises smoothly. When it doesn't work, it really doesn't work, and there's some teeth gnashing and maybe a little praying Zig reaches 1.0 soon.

People want a be-all-end-all tool, but Rust is just not that, so you get tons of arguments about this or that use case. You wouldn't use a saw to hammer in a nail. Just treat it like a tool.