> A “being effective at rust” book would probably dwarf a “being effective at C++” book in pages assuming similar prose. And we all know how much of a beast C++ is.
I've written C++ for close to a decade before switching to Rust, and this is categorically untrue.
> Plus you need to have a general knowledge of memory. You need to understand how memory is being abstracted and how to work within those constraints so as not to be slow.
If anything, this is more true so of C++.
> You need to know all of the monads, what they mean, why each exists, what the nuance is, and why you might use one over another in a specific situation
You can use a lot of stuff before needing to know their full history. You don't need to know the history behind 0, null, pointer, numbers and addresses before, how hardware works, etc to use Option, for example. You also don't need to know the (inconsistent and arcane) history of errno and magic numbers to use Result. Etc, etc.
This vastly over-exaggerates Rust's complexity.
Yes, it borrows concepts from functional programming, but a lot of these concepts are simpler than stuff you deal with in imperative programming.
I think the issues here is that people don't tend to like to change their way of thinking, even if it's for the better. Also, Rust has ample in common with imperative/traditional language, so it's not a huge leap into some alien mental model, as you make it sound.
Further, C++ makes you think way more than Rust; in Rust the compiler does a lot of the thinking for you. Not to mention, the type system is easiest to reason about than C++'s old (and mentally inefficient) template system.
I've written C++ for close to a decade before switching to Rust, and this is categorically untrue.
> Plus you need to have a general knowledge of memory. You need to understand how memory is being abstracted and how to work within those constraints so as not to be slow.
If anything, this is more true so of C++.
> You need to know all of the monads, what they mean, why each exists, what the nuance is, and why you might use one over another in a specific situation
You can use a lot of stuff before needing to know their full history. You don't need to know the history behind 0, null, pointer, numbers and addresses before, how hardware works, etc to use Option, for example. You also don't need to know the (inconsistent and arcane) history of errno and magic numbers to use Result. Etc, etc.
This vastly over-exaggerates Rust's complexity.
Yes, it borrows concepts from functional programming, but a lot of these concepts are simpler than stuff you deal with in imperative programming.
I think the issues here is that people don't tend to like to change their way of thinking, even if it's for the better. Also, Rust has ample in common with imperative/traditional language, so it's not a huge leap into some alien mental model, as you make it sound.
Further, C++ makes you think way more than Rust; in Rust the compiler does a lot of the thinking for you. Not to mention, the type system is easiest to reason about than C++'s old (and mentally inefficient) template system.