[Quekid5]

> But they obviously didn't put any effort into the syntax.

Ackshually moment here, but they did put a lot of effort into chosing syntax which would require very little look-ahead on the part of the parser (given current or even decade+ old parser tech). I don't understand their reasons for doing so at all, but that's what they did.

The result is... not very human-friendly IMO.

[still_grokking]

Exactly my point. This syntax was made for machines, not for humans. That's just not reasonable given how fast our computers are, and where the actual work for a modern compiler lies.

But I don't get that either: Parsing is today the least problem. The time you spend parsing is negligible (if you didn't mess up the language completely, of course) compared to the time for type-checking and optimizations.

Avoiding look-ahead (or especially the need to re-parse parts recursively) is a very good rule of thumb, sure. But when you need to decide whether you make the language simpler to read for the machine or more heavyweight for the human the answer should be absolute clear.

A modern compiler spends anyway most of its time in the semantic analysis (and depending on language, later optimizing the output). Optimizing the lexical part for the win of a few milliseconds on tens of thousands of lines just makes no sense. Today's computers are even fast enough to parse spoken human language fast enough. Again it's the analysis that takes time there.

The thing with Rust's syntax is especially annoying as almost everything else in that language makes a lot of sense. The concepts are neatly put together. It's explicit about the right things. It's considerably small and simple. It's almost a kind of sweet spot in language design, imho. And than it was hit hard with the ugly stick. That's a really sad point. And so needless.

I still hope they will come to their mind some day, and will start to offer a kind of "light" syntax at some point.

I really wish Rust could be more like Scala 3 on the outside, with a clean, minimal pythonic look & feel, and not like how someone put it before in a comment in this thread "When I look at Rust, all I see is `{};`". The later is also exactly my impression, sadly.

[brundolf]

It’s not just about parser throughput, it also helps with giving better error messages (because the compiler can make better sense of partially-broken syntax), which is something the Rust team cares a whole lot about.

[still_grokking]

I don't buy that.

Good error messages and robust error recovery for syntax errors are possible for almost any kind of language, even very weird ones, with today's modern parser technology. Just have a look at what for example Tree-Sitter does.

But the meat of good programming language error messages lies not in the syntax errors. It's in meaningful and informative semantic error messages. And these are almost completely independent of the language's syntax.

[c-cube]

Tree-sitter became somewhat popular after rust reached 1.0, as far as I can tell.

I personally find rust syntax pretty neat. It's designed to be unambiguous to machines, but that also means it's unambiguous to humans. It has no () around tests, but it mandates {} because that prevents goto fail. It has the classic ML `;` as a separator, not terminator. It's a pragmatic blend of C++ (with generics, namespacing, and the C influence), and ML (expression based, easy to parse, let-binding and type inference).