this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Rust
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That's easier said than done. I find that there's no clear vision of what "idiomatic" Rust is. With functional programming, it feels like there's a strong theoretical basis of how to structure and write code: pure functions everywhere, anything unpure (file access, network access, input conversion, parsing, etc.) goes into a monad. TBF, the only functional code I write is in JS or
nixand nix-lang is... not really made for programming, nor is there any clear idea of what "good" nix code looks like.Rust however... are
Arc,Box,Rc,async, etc. fine?matchorif/else? How should errors be handled? Are macros OK? Yes, theclippylinter exists, but it can't/won't answer those questions for you. Also the fact that there is no inheritance leads to some awkward solutions when there is stuff that is hierarchical or shares attributes (Person -> Employee -> Boss -> ... | Animal -> Mammal-Reptile-Insect --> Dog-Snake-Grasshopper). I haven't found good examples of solutions or guidance on these things.My rust code still feel kludgy, yet safe after a year of using it.
Sometimes I wonder if this pure search for being "idiomatic" is worth the effort. On paper yes, more idiomatic code is almost always a good thing, it feels more natural to create code in a way the language was designed to be used. But it practice, you don't get any points for being more idiomatic and your code isn't necessarily going to be safer either (smart pointers are often "good enough"). I'm fine using references to pass parameters to function and I love the idea to "force" the programmer to organize objects in a tree way (funny enough I was already doing that in C++), but I'll take a Rc rather than a lifetimed reference as a field in a structure any day. That shit becomes unreadable fast!
EDIT: but I love cargo clippy! It tells me what to change to get more idiomatic points. Who knows why an if/then/else is better than a match for two values, but clippy says so, and who am I to question the idiomatic gods?
@Blackthorn @onlinepersona Feels the best when you don't have to do either.