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.
@onlinepersona @snaggen
people write oo code in linux source code using c. With rust is simple. Just use composition, and you can explore the traits, that serves as and is better than interfaces.
@onlinepersona @snaggen another problem I see people doing while writing rust, is trying to write code like java. Rust isn't an OO language, but you can organize your code and have hierarchies.
IMO I think this is a common fallacy. OOP does not mean inheritance/hierarchies (despite them being part of every introductory OOP course nowadays). The original meaning of OOP had nothing to do with inheritance, that idea was mostly popularised by Java. And these days not even Java devs recommend inheritance as the first port of call but instead often favour composition and interfaces as the better language constructs.
Rust is as good at OOP styles as it is functional or procedural, if you ignore inheritance as a requirement of OOP. And a lot of code in rust can look and feel like OOP code in other languages. The abilities to encapsulate state, and polymorphism your code are far better features of OOP and both are well supported in rust. IMO rust offers the useful features from all paradigms fairly equally, which lets you write in any style you like, or even mix and match depending on the various situations. As one is not always better then the others, but each alone is useful in specific situations. More languages should be like this rather than forcing everything into one mold as it lets you pick the best style for each task.