I've recently written a "system tool" in Rust, and, while it wasn't as bad, in terms of productivity, as I had imagined at first, there are certain domains where Rust is really a grind.

Working with filenames/paths is one of those - if one works with (transforms) filenames/paths, the code will be polluted with all the conversions between PathBuf/Path/OsString/OsStr (and the canonical String/&str); this makes it hard to reason about the abstract logic.

It absolutely makes sense that Rust forces one to consider the robustness of the code, but in some cases one just doesn't want such robustness.

Cyclic graphs are another very ugly thing to work with in Rust (without supporting libraries).

If you don't care about robustness for paths with invalid utf-8, you could try camino https://crates.io/crates/camino

Very interesting! I'll actually check out if it fits my project. Thanks!

I agree with the string argument. I felt the same struggle, too many string types. It is hard to remember when to use what.

I wish there were one string type to rule them all.

> I wish an expressive language like Rust, but with a GC

Ocaml or ReasonML are pretty close to that.

D

And F#.