Re:Announcing Rust 1.22
by Manishearth on Thursday November 23, 2017 @07:07AM
(#15764505)
> a systems language should make that clear
Folks always say this but never really clarify why this should be the case.
When doing low lever unsafe stuff Rust does indeed make it very clear if something is a pointer or not, and avoids weird coercions (even C doesn't do well here!)
But for normal code, does it really matter if something is a pointer or not? In C++ already with by-ref and move values and stuff you have implicit pointers in many places that don't behave as pointers.
Rust never goes the way of adding implicit allocations or implicit indirection; it only goes in the way of stripping it, which is rarely if ever a problem except when dealing with unsafe code (where Rust is more explicit on pointers anyway).
Folks always say this but never really clarify why this should be the case.
When doing low lever unsafe stuff Rust does indeed make it very clear if something is a pointer or not, and avoids weird coercions (even C doesn't do well here!)
But for normal code, does it really matter if something is a pointer or not? In C++ already with by-ref and move values and stuff you have implicit pointers in many places that don't behave as pointers.
Rust never goes the way of adding implicit allocations or implicit indirection; it only goes in the way of stripping it, which is rarely if ever a problem except when dealing with unsafe code (where Rust is more explicit on pointers anyway).