Re:So You Want to Rust the Linux Kernel?
by bsder on Monday October 11, 2021 @09:28PM
(#28835013)
> If Rust would have just used a C-style syntax instead of this wacky quirky stuff that's needlessly hard to read
A lot of the "whacky, quirky" stuff is to avoid the clusterfuck that is C and C++ parsing.
People want IDEs. They also want their IDE to do smart things. Having to compile the universe to get the IDE to do something smart doesn't work very well.
Take a "simple" task like "Is this is a variable name? That is a type definition?". C and C++ have to practically do a full compile to figure that out (see: typedef and templates). Rust, on the other hand, just has to read a few tokens and it knows definitively the answer to that question.
And, you may call this stuff "quirky", but practically all the languages designed in the last 10 years have converged to similar goals and syntaxes to Rust. Language designers know that people don't like "different from C" but they do it anyway.
Think about whether your arguments are stronger than those who are designing new programming languages that they want adopted.
A lot of the "whacky, quirky" stuff is to avoid the clusterfuck that is C and C++ parsing.
People want IDEs. They also want their IDE to do smart things. Having to compile the universe to get the IDE to do something smart doesn't work very well.
Take a "simple" task like "Is this is a variable name? That is a type definition?". C and C++ have to practically do a full compile to figure that out (see: typedef and templates). Rust, on the other hand, just has to read a few tokens and it knows definitively the answer to that question.
And, you may call this stuff "quirky", but practically all the languages designed in the last 10 years have converged to similar goals and syntaxes to Rust. Language designers know that people don't like "different from C" but they do it anyway.
Think about whether your arguments are stronger than those who are designing new programming languages that they want adopted.