/dislike-in-rust

A list of the few things I don't like about rust (FORK)

Things I dislike about rust

I frequently refer to rust as being like someone reached directly into my heart and pulled out a programming language. Not only is almost everything about it truely excellent, but it's all so perfectly aligned with how I naturally work and create designs that it's almost spooky. I had an unusually easy time getting used to the borrow checker because that sort of top-down, strict ownship is already how I like to be working.

Given this, I'm often asked if there's anything I dislike about Rust. While there is hardly anything I can find to dislike (even the weirdo stuff that bothers a lot of people, like how async is so different than in other languages), I know there are some things, and I find that I'm always forgetting what they are when I'm on the spot, so I started this list to keep track.

Generally this list is for things Rust has or does; I probably won't be listing things that aren't in rust that I pine for, especially if I know they're being worked on (GATs, generators, etc).

The list

  • panic is recoverable. One of the major great things about Rust is how Result replaces exception and makes control flow explict, obviating the need for "exception safety". The idea that panics can unwind and recover removes this advantage. Given the choice I'd happily make panic and unconditional process abort.
  • The Sum and Product traits are generics gone too far; they're such a pain to use (because they're even worse than collect about failing type inference) and don't really serve any purpose (as far as I can tell) that isn't served by FromIterator or fold.
  • Everything about Pin
  • The ubiquitous use of *const T and *mut T instead of NonNull in the standard library
  • Drop takes &mut Self instead of Self, making certain kinds of destructuring impossible without unsafe.
  • The Borrow trait is too limited– it can't express other borrowed forms besides references.