Rust Additions for GCC 15 Bring Support for If-Let Statements

Re:Rust Additions for GCC 15 Bring Support for If-Let Statem... by jamincan on Monday March 24, 2025 @08:10AM (#43460025)

In general, I find Rust very readable. The areas I do find I struggle are generics and lifetimes, and I don't think it's a feature of Rust syntax that makes me struggle and is instead the fact that people tend to use non-descriptive names for lifetimes or generics. It's hard to pick apart a trait that has four generics name T, U, V, and W, or lifetimes 'a, 'b, and 'c.

Usually people will try to make it the first letter of something meaningful, but it is still much harder to parse.

My own preference is to use more descriptive names except in trivial cases. Having the lifetime mirror a struct member name or a parameter name is really helpful for understanding them, in my opinion.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Rust Additions for GCC 15 Bring Support for If-Let Statem... by tialaramex on Monday March 24, 2025 @08:53AM (#43460501)

Yeah, I think it's non-obvious that you can name a lifetime 'frame not 'f - yes the compiler won't know you named it that because it's only supposed to live for one frame, but that's also true for your variable named timeout, Rust can see it's a Duration, so it has appropriate affordances, but it can't know you meant to call set_timeout(timeout) and not just store it somewhere.

I have a backlog item to find Rust docs which use a concise lifetime name but could value a better one, however there aren't actually that many cases other than the scoped threads which do indeed name the scopes 'scope and 'env showing that we can give these meaningful names.

[ Parent | on HN ]