[pbsd]

My comment appears to have been more polarizing than I ever expected. Let me clear some things up.

In your unique_ptr example, you're right: the reference doesn't outlast its owner, but it becomes a dangerous zombie after getting its guts removed. It is worth mentioning that the behavior may or may not be UB depending on how `foo` takes its parameters: std::move is really just a cast.

Maybe interest is the wrong word to use; many functional languages have generated a lot of interest, but this interest has historically not translated into actual mass usage. Instead, popular languages have adopted certain functional features over time (lambdas, comprehensions, type classes, etc), but have remained fundamentally Algolian for the most part. Rust seems to go in the opposite direction: start with ML (or something ML-like, anyway), and strip it down until it fits into the C++ space.

I am definitely interested in C++ replacements, to be clear. I have explored things that stray from it much more than Rust, such as Haskell and ATS, but I went into those fully expecting to see something different. But look at documents such as [1], and tell me that it doesn't create the expectation that Rust is trying to fit C++'s shoes a little too tightly. Additionally, trawling through mailing list discussions, familiarity with C-like languages seems to have been a design principle since the start (see for example the <> vs [] for generics debate).

Finally, I wasn't (and am not) passing judgment on Rust for being what it is. I was conveying my experience from being excited about it, to being less excited about it after actually learning it. I don't expect a productive discussion to come out of it; I've also seen how defensive the Rust community can be [2].

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/wiki/Rust-for-CXX-programm...

[2] https://pay.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2bbeqe/it_started_out...

[dbaupp]

I think the situation of your [1] is that Rust has ended up close enough to C++ that it's useful and meaningful to provide a translation guide between concepts, to help C++ programmers get up to speed more easily; it's certainly not a design document or anything like that. Maybe I'm missing your point. (As I said elsewhere, C++ has had a lot of experience in this space, and so has a lot of good ideas, Rust is not ashamed to borrow them.)

On that note, would you interpret [a] as meaning Rust is trying to be a functional language? The reality is more plagiaristic: functional language have nice features and so Rust borrows some of them. (In my mind the correct interpretation of both documents would be: Rust is a mesh of various languages with enough similarity to many for translation guides to be helpful.)

There has been syntactic decisions tilting towards C++/Java/C# programmers (like the <> for generics), but as far as I can remember those sort of decisions are all minor in terms of semantics. For the most part the actual semantic behaviours are considered in terms of "does Rust need this" rather than "will this move us more towards C++" (even if the feature was inspired by C++).

[a]: http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-program...

[pbsd]

You're right, arriving at that kind of conclusion from the existence of a tutorial is bad reasoning. I had wrong expectations, I suppose.

I must thank you for pointing that link out to me, though: it said what I was trying to say much better than I could in its prologue. Namely, how hard it is to sell a functional language to old-school C people, and how Rust may have a hard time with that (even if it's not a pure functional language).