My understanding is that rust provides safety guarantees that no other language matches, but at the cost of pretty much everything else. In that regard, the "linked list" example is a pretty good (although maybe over-pathological) example of the hard parts of the language.
The build system is easier to use than any other language I know of. Integrating third-party libraries into a project is night-and-day between C++ and Rust, and the Rust ecosystem benefits tremendously from it.
Energy efficiency is also extremely good, as is performance.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/sustainability-with-...
And as far as code confidence, I don't know of any other language that compares, either. You can dodge memory safety errors in Java or C# thanks to the GC, but exceptions keep flow control from being as explicit as Rust since your function can be silently pre-empted.
I see Java or C# as paying a small (and in many cases fully justified) cost to smooth things over so there's less friction to development. Go additionally adopts an extreme focus on keeping the language small and simple so it's easy to learn.
Rust declines to pay that runtime cost, but requires you to explicitly address those friction points, while C++ lets you hang yourself.
Rust also has a carefully curated standard library and idiomatic patterns, while C++ has addressed the problem of lessons learned by continually adding to the standard library without keeping different features compatible or consistent with each other.
So, yes, Rust will have a steeper learning curve, but it levels off long before C++'s does. In addition, the compiler messages are far more helpful in Rust, and the default tooling is far better than C++.
One area where C++ still runs rings around Rust, for example, is modern database kernels. Rust’s safety features largely don’t apply, so no benefit, and Rust has large expressivity gaps that make it more complex and less safe to implement things that are straightforward in C++. Also, the relatively weak generics and metaprogramming features of Rust causes this type of code to balloon in size and invites bugs.
But for other types of code, this barely matters at all because you don’t have many uses for these C++ features. Horses for courses.
The linked list is the data structure equivalent of self-modifying code. It’s easy for a novice to understand, but there’s no great reason for anyone to actually do it today outside of a specialized library.
It’s not like that at all. The difference you’re identifying is that C# has it in the standard library while C does not. But it’s a conceptually intricate problem and implementing it from scratch in both C and C# would actually be somewhat similar, but C# obviously has some convenience features that would make the code tighter.
Linked lists are very simple and GP’s complaint is that Rust makes it very difficult to implement them.
Both C# and Rust include features in their standard libraries so that implementing your own linked lists is unnecessary precisely because you are not supposed to. This is “non-idiomatic” as they say. C does not include linked lists in the standard library because this is exactly the kind of data structure you are meant to create when needed as the language makes it completely trivial to implement them. In C, a linked list is completely idiomatic and many, many C projects use them.
If you write an OS in C, you will almost certainly create a linked list structure. Linux did. If you write an OS in Rust, you do not need to do that.
While I don’t think it matters that much in practice for many types of systems software, I think it is fair to recognize that this lack of basic expressivity is occasionally troublesome and an unexpected gap in the context of classical computer science for someone learning Rust.
This is like a C# dev trolling a C developer by say “first novice exercise”, HTML encode a UTF8 string. I mean, it is a single line of code in C# so how hard could it be in C?
Or, it is like a C dev telling a Java programmer that their “first novice exercise” should be to write a fixed binary layout to a device driver or even just to call directly into an OS system call. Both are trivial in C after all. How about using a hash table for something though? Reasonably big job in C but new HashMap in Java.
Rust is designed to prevent exactly the kind of thing you do to create a linked list and it is designed to make it difficult for a good reason. It is a cherry picked example meant to sound smart but, in reality, it is an eye-rollingly dumb thing to say.
In DOS, I can write a program to dynamically overwrite and extend the behaviour of the operating system in RAM. In Linux, I cannot easily do that. I guess that means DOS is more advanced? To me, this sounds like the argument you are making about Rust.
I do it care which language people like. There are pros and cons of each and legit arguments on use one over the other. Why not use one of the valid arguments instead of dumb gotcha comments that only tell us the languages are different and not which one is better.