[politician]

> abstractions are just always a good idea

The "zero-cost" phrase is deceptive. There's a non-zero cognitive cost to the author and all subsequent readers. A proliferation of abstractions increases the cost of every other abstraction further due to complex interactions. This is true of in all languages where the community has embraced the idea of abstraction without moderation.

[fnordpiglet]

Well, the intent of an abstraction is it comes at a non zero cost to the author but a substantial benefit to the user/reader. If it’s a cost to everyone why are you doing it at all?

Rust embraces zero to low cost abstraction at the machine performance level, although to get reflective or runtime adaptive abstractions you end up losing some of that zero cost as you need to start boxing and moving things into heaps and using vtables, etc. IMO this is where rust is weakest and most complex.

[fauigerzigerk]

> There's a non-zero cognitive cost to the author and all subsequent readers.

No, the cognitive cost of a particular abstraction relative to all other abstractions under consideration can be negative.

The option of not using any abstraction doesn’t exist. If you disagree with that then I think we have to go back one step and ask what an abstraction even is.

[cma]

It also often makes debugging harder.