by josephg | 2026-01-01 13:15:46+00:00
> To me it feels like rust is barely readable sometimes. When I read some rust cost, I am often incapable to guess what it does, so it does not feel intuitive.

I feel torn with this sentiment.

On one hand, I totally agree. Rust's "foreign" ideas (borrowck, lifetimes, match expressions, traits, etc) make it harder to learn because there's a bunch of new concepts that nobody has really worked with before. Some of this stuff - lifetimes and borrows especially - really demand a lot of imagination on behalf of the programmer to be able to understand what's actually going on. The amount of thinking I do per shipped line of code seems higher for rust than it does for languages like Go, Typescript and C#. And sometimes C.

On the other hand, I learned C about 30 years ago. Not only have I forgotten how hard it was to learn, but I had the brain of a teenager at the time. And now I'm in my (early) 40s. I'm scared that some of the struggle I went through learning rust came because my brain is old now, and I've forgotten what its like to be out of my depth with a programming language. Learning rust requires shaking up some old neurons. And that's really good for us, but it sucks.

In reality, I think its a bit of both. I've been using rust a lot for about 3-4 years now. Its gotten way easier. But I still prototype a fair bit of algorithmic code in typescript first because I find TS makes it easier to iterate. That implies rust is actually more complex. But, some people pick rust as their first language and it seems to work out fine? I'm not sure.

> I don't think the borrow checker forced rust to be such a complicated language.

Which parts of rust seem complicated? I've found a lot of the things I struggled with at first got a lot easier with familiarity. I love traits and match expressions. I love rust's implementation of generics. I love most things about cargo and the module system. But also, some parts of rust annoy me a lot more now, a few years in.

I disagree with your comment. I think the main source of complexity in rust comes from lifetimes - which are required by the borrow checker. For example, its not obvious when you need to put lifetimes in explicitly and when you can elide them. When does the borrow checker understand my code? (Eg, can you mutably borrow two different elements in an array at the same time?). I also still don't really understand Higher-Rank Trait Bounds.

I also still find Pin really confusing. In general I think async and Futures in rust have some big design flaws. It also really bothers me that there's a class of data types that the compiler can generate and use, which are impossible to name in the language. And some of the rules around derive and traits are annoying and silly. Eg derive(Clone) on a generic struct adds the constraint T: Clone, which is straight out wrong. And rust needs a better answer to the orphan rule.

But in general, if you take out the borrow checker, I find rust to be simpler and easier to read than most C++. There's no headers. No exceptions. No wild template nonsense. And there's generally way less weird magic going on. Eg, Foo(bar); could mean about 8 different things in C++. Rust isn't like that. Rust is simple enough you can just read the standard library, even as a beginner, and its great. C++'s STL is a disaster to read.

Rust is definitely more complex than C. But you do get some lovely features for that extra cognitive overhead. Whether or not thats worth it is up to you. In general - and I've been saying this for years - I feel like the language I really want is rust 2. I can't wait for someone to take rust's best ideas and refine them into a simpler language.