I'm used to writing C, and think pointers are easy to understand. I wouldn't call rust 'hard' to learn, but it is without a doubt painful. You also aren't doing manual memory management in rust either... I'd assume the sentiment comes from the irrelevant hoops rust makes you jump through to just compile something simple.

You don't need to be aware of 1000s of foot guns for every block of non rust code. But you do have to remember dozens of pedantic rules, or stdlib wrappers just to trick rust into allowing you to compile your simple/demo code.

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ipdashc 7 months ago | parent [-]

> You don't need to be aware of 1000s of foot guns for every block of non rust code. But you do have to remember dozens of pedantic rules

Have you tried using rust-analyzer? I'm usually a bit of an IDE skeptic, but Rust is one of those languages where tight integration with the IDE really helps IMO. It's night and day, I honestly wouldn't want to write Rust without rust-analyzer, but with it it's quite pleasant.

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grayhatter 7 months ago | parent [-]

I deleted all IDE features (other than good highlighting) and I'm never going back! I kept adding more and more IDE features, and my subjective enjoyment and happiness writing code kept decreasing. I deleted them, and I love writing code again!

I think the fact that the language is aggravating without complex and tight IDE integration is one of the best indictments of the language there is. Java is another language that's intolerable without impossibly complex IDE support. The more rust matures the more it feels like that.

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tialaramex 7 months ago | parent [-]

Unlike your parent, I don't use an IDE at all, I write Rust in just a plain vim, no language server, I don't even bother with syntax highlighting.

Still, I'd say that actually the distinction that's aggravating you is almost entirely that Rust won't compile a lot of code that's nonsense, whereas in C++ that code compiles - it's still nonsense, but it compiled anyway. I think that's just plainly worse.

	▲	grayhatter 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		The very first time I used rust for a work project, I tried to implement a tree... well actually I tried to implement a linked list first, later hoping to expand it into a graph. The distinction that's aggravating me is the compiler refuses to compile code that I know is correct, but it's not smart enough to prove it, so it just gives me the finger instead.