Re:Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust
by steveklabnik on Monday May 03, 2021 @11:38AM
(#27026448)
Oh totally, I know you :) It's interesting how our perceptions are different though, I think a lot of the "dumb" questions went away since NLL. I wonder if there's a way to quantify this.
So, I think this is the thing: I also think that it was easier to learn lexically, personally. I too was worried that it would make things harder. But, I just don't think that's been demonstrated to be true across most people. It is, however, only my gut-check feeling for what I've seen. I could be wrong.
(And, the borrowcheck documentation is very minimal, and didn't really change with NLL, other than needing to add some println!s to make things not compile again. So it's certainly not because I wrote some amazing docs and explained it in a good way, hehe.)
Re:Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust
by chrismorgan on Monday May 03, 2021 @02:20PM
(#27028751)
I started in mid-2013 too, and my position is similar to yours. I'd characterise it like this: lexical lifetimes are easier to grok, but NLL turns out to be more practical, doing what people actually want (where LL didn't) enough that it overcomes the greater conceptual complexity, because you have to actually think about the concepts less often.
Perhaps it's all just confirmation bias on my end, but I think truly understanding lifetimes was easier the way I learned it back then. That said, I have never bothered to write documentation for the Rust project, whereas few Rust contributors can claim to be in the same league as you in that area. We probably have very different perspectives.