Rant after trying Rust a bit

[simendsjo via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 22 July 2015 at 19:54:05 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> Traits system is awesome and pure win.

Agreed.

> Pattern matching is not > that game changing but helps often
> enough to feel important.

The fact that you can use pattern matching many places makes it
very much a win.

     if Some(InnerClass::SomeType(value)) = some_call() {
         // here you can use `value`
     }

> Borrowship system is damn smart but totally impractical for 
> most real-world cases.

I haven't used Rust enough to really have a voice on the subject.
It looks like a pardigm shift, and it might only take some getting
used to, but it might also be very difficult to use. There are
some big stuff written in Rust though - the rust compiler and the
servo browser engine. The fact that it makes a lot of errors
impossible is the exiting thing for me.

> Macros are utterly horrible and pretty much unusable outside
> of advanced library internals.

Not sure what you are referencing here. Macros expand to code. If
you compare this to string mixins, they are a lot easier for tool
writers, but a lot less powerful.

> Recently I attended local Rust meetup for curious newcomers - 
> it was very interesting to observe reaction of unbiased devs 
> not familiar with D at all. General reaction was "this is 
> awesome interesting language that I would never use for any 
> production system unless I am crazy or can throw away money 
> like crazy". Because, well, productivity.

I'm having some problems interpreting this. This is people in
a Rust meetup - in other words, early adopters. And they thing
D is crazy "becuse productivity"? I don't understand what you
mean.

> D has done many things wrong, but there is one right thing that 
> totally outshines it all - it is cost-effective and pragmatical 
> tool for a very wide scope of applications.

Yes, D is pragmatic and extremely powerful and meldable to every
usecase.