Why are you using D instead of Rust?

[IGotD-]

On Saturday, 23 October 2021 at 04:25:21 UTC, Dr Machine Code 
wrote:
> Just would like to know you all opinions

Programming rust as a high level language only using the 
primitives in the standard library, you probably will do find. 
Aesthetics is not one of the strong sides of Rust in my opinion 
though and when you compare codes in Rosetta you often find that 
the rust implementation is longer.

When you step outside the box, then the ugliness starts to show 
up.

I was investigating the intrusive collections in Rust.

https://github.com/Amanieu/intrusive-rs

One notable file, src/adapter.rs you will see a macro 
intrusive_adapter. The purpose of the macro is to expand an 
entire implementation of the algorithm. I guess the author has 
done this because the generic system in Rust is too limited than 
using standard generics. If you abuse this macro you can in 
practice create a new expanded implementation for every source 
file you use it in which can lead to longer compile times and 
code duplication. You'd hope that the compiler is smart enough to 
remove duplicates of the same type.

One thing you notice is that the macro almost unreadable. I don't 
often agree with Walter but not allowing macros in D I do agree 
with. Adding macros to D would risk making the readability 
unbearable.

With many other languages, implementing these algorithms are 
often done in a few 100 lines but the Rust implementation is 
huge. You also notice that general code isn't that readable 
either.

In these cases you'd think that an offsetof compiler statement in 
order to find the offset of a member variable in a struct would 
help. Problem is that Rust doesn't have any offsetof. Rust has 
been around of over 10 years and offsetof is one of the first 
things you'd implement but not in Rust. There are crates that 
implements this and there you also notice how the authors has 
implemented hacks to achieve this simple thing.


The more I use Rust and look under the hood, the more what the 
h... revelations I get. I can see how Rust might appeals to the 
C++ crowd who likes the over complicated parts in C++ and that 
way gives them hubris when they circumvent the limitations of 
Rust.