Rust: A Critical Retrospective
> This is a superficial complaint, but I found Rust syntax to be dense, heavy, and difficult to read<p>I'm a huge Rust fan, but sort of agree. First, I dislike C-style syntax in general and find it all very noisy with lots of unnecessary symbols. Second, while I love traits, when you have a trait heavy type all those impl blocks start adding up giving you lots of boilerplate and often not much substance (esp. with all the where clauses on each block). Add in generics and it is often hard to see what is trying to be achieved.<p>That said, I've mostly reached the conclusion that much of this is unavoidable. Systems languages need to have lots of detail you just don't need in higher level languages like Haskell or Python, and trait impls on arbitrary types after the fact is very powerful and not something I would want to give up. I've even done some prototyping of what alternative syntaxes might look like and they aren't much improvement. There is just a lot of data that is needed by the compiler.<p>In summary, Rust syntax is noisy and excessive, but I'm not convinced much could have been done about it.