> people use Rust because it’s fast but then they complain about the semantics that make it fast.
I don't think most people use Rust because it's fast - fast is nice but Rust is being thrown at a bunch of use cases (e.g. backend services and APIs) for which it replaces "slower" garbage collected languages (the language being faster doesn't always make the overall product/service faster but that's a separate question).
What Rust gives you is a viable potential alternative to C and C++ in places where you absolutely can't have a GC language, and that's a huge deal, the problems and confusion start when people try to use Rust for everything.
> everybody agrees that Rust is too complicated
I don't think this is true either - a large part of the Rust community seem to think that it's as complicated as it needs to be. As a beginner/outsider, I found it kind of cumbersome to get started with, but that's certainly not everyone's opinion.
> Most people would probably be better served by a language that was a tiny bit slower but had better developer productivity.
True, and such languages already exist and are widely used, Rust doesn't need to fit that use case.
> I don't think this is true either - a large part of the Rust community seem to think that it's as complicated as it needs to be. As a beginner/outsider, I found it kind of cumbersome to get started with, but that's certainly not everyone's opinion
With any language there’s an active part of the community and then there’s the “dark matter” of people who use the language but are not actively involved in shaping its direction, forums or subreddits, etc.
Of course the people who are actively involved are likely to be of the opinion that all the complexity is necessary, but I doubt that applies to the broader Rust userbase.
> I don't think this is true either - a large part of the Rust community seem to think that it's as complicated as it needs to be. As a beginner/outsider, I found it kind of cumbersome to get started with, but that's certainly not everyone's opinion.
Personally I feel it's not complicated enough. Where is my function overloading, variadic templates and usable compile time reflection? (Sure you can sometimes use macros but ew macros)
> Personally I feel it's not complicated enough. Where is my function overloading, variadic templates and usable compile time reflection? (Sure you can sometimes use macros but ew macros)
Indeed. Rust is really crying out for a real CTFE implementation + richer macros to replace the mess that is procmacros (I really don't want to have to run an arbitrary external binary with full system access just to manipulate the AST...)
I don't think most people use Rust because it's fast - fast is nice but Rust is being thrown at a bunch of use cases (e.g. backend services and APIs) for which it replaces "slower" garbage collected languages (the language being faster doesn't always make the overall product/service faster but that's a separate question).
What Rust gives you is a viable potential alternative to C and C++ in places where you absolutely can't have a GC language, and that's a huge deal, the problems and confusion start when people try to use Rust for everything.
> everybody agrees that Rust is too complicated
I don't think this is true either - a large part of the Rust community seem to think that it's as complicated as it needs to be. As a beginner/outsider, I found it kind of cumbersome to get started with, but that's certainly not everyone's opinion.
> Most people would probably be better served by a language that was a tiny bit slower but had better developer productivity.
True, and such languages already exist and are widely used, Rust doesn't need to fit that use case.