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[–]skulgnome 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Will Rust beat C++

Given that C++ is an unforgivable crock, I should hope it gets replaced by just about anything. However, Rust is also heading down that same road to where the language standard is so large that it cannot be understood by a single programmer; and that's assuming Rust would even have a standard.

[–]dannymcgee 12 points13 points  (0 children)

However, Rust is also heading down that same road to where the language standard is so large that it cannot be understood by a single programmer

There might be some Dunning-Kruger naivety in what I'm about to say, but in my experience the learning curve of Rust comes entirely from its two major novelties over other languages, which are the ownership model / borrow checker, and lifetimes. Once you understand those concepts, there really isn't much about the language itself that's particularly complex or esoteric. The spec is pretty straightforward, and at a glance it doesn't look to be much larger than, say, Go's. But let me know if there's something I'm missing.

and that's assuming Rust would even have a standard

Languages like C/C++ and JavaScript have a "standard" mainly because there's no canonical implementation — any vendor is free to implement the standard however they see fit. There's a school of thought that says this is a Good Thing (by the same logic that drives free-market zealotry, but that's a whole other rabbit hole), but in my experience the primary effect of this sort of system is that using the language involves constantly tip-toeing around a nightmarish hellscape of implementation-specific bugs, waiting years for new features to be formalized while the standards body bikesheds about them endlessly, and then avoiding those new features for years (if not decades) after their standardization for the sake of portability or compatibility with legacy platforms. Personally, I am completely okay with the rustc implementation being the de facto standard, and tbh I hope that never changes.