- compilation speed is not as impressive. To me this is imho the biggest pain point with C++, bigger then memory unsafety.
- I missed templates based on any value/symbol, it forced macros on me in my very first try. I don't think it's a problem once you know Rust, but having to write macros was too intimidating for a newb.
> compilation speed is not as impressive. To me this is imho the biggest pain point with C++, bigger then memory unsafety.
Compilation speed remains a work in progress; it's improved a lot in recent versions. Note that 80% of the compilation time in rustc is actually in LLVM passes (the same used by clang), which are mostly optimizations, so turning off optimization helps Rust compile times a lot. LLVM as a backend does many more optimizations than DMD (and 6g/8g for that matter) and runs slower as a result.
One issue is that Rust currently does not do incremental compilation below the crate level, so you will need to use many crates if you want incremental compilation. This will possibly change at some point via a ccache-like mechanism.
If memory safety is not important to your applications, though, then Rust may indeed not be the right choice. Rust requires you to make sacrifices (a learning curve and less flexible unique pointers) to ensure memory safety, and if you just want to write "new" and "delete" then Rust isn't going to be the best language for you. (That said, I think there is a strong argument to be made that for many classes of programs it is worth some pain to eliminate memory safety problems, because memory safety issues frequently lead to security vulnerabilities. For us as browser manufacturers, memory safety is so important it is worth sacrificing literally everything else except maybe performance in some cases.)
> - I missed templates based on any value/symbol, it forced macros on me in my very first try. I don't think it's a problem once you know Rust, but having to write macros was too intimidating for a newb.
In general you want to use traits instead of macros to write generic functions. There are some current limitations with traits but I think they're a more scalable approach than ad-hoc templates. It'd be helpful to know exactly what limitations you were hitting.
Ok I think I was unfair to Rust in my top message. "Creating problems of their own" was not accurate, but I am under the impression I would miss some D things if using Rust.
> Note that 80% of the compilation time in rustc is actually in LLVM passes (the same used by clang), which are mostly optimizations.
OK I had a flawed perception probably because of this.
> That said, I think there is a strong argument to be made that for many classes of programs it is worth some pain to eliminate memory safety problems
I agree 100%, especially on teams memory safety become incredibly important, also I have to thank you for fixing C integer promotion which I've seen create many bugs.
> It'd be helpful to know exactly what limitations you were hitting.
Ah, OK. From a glance I think some combination of higher-kinded type parameters, functional dependencies/associated types, and associated constants could fix the issues you were hitting that forced you to use macros. But I'll talk to bjz. Thanks for the pointers!
