Is it just me, or does Rust feel much more bare-bones than other languages? I just started learning it recently and this is the one thing that stood out to me, much more so than the memory management business. A lot of things that would normally be part of the language has to be achieved through meta-programming in Rust.

Is this a deliberate design choice? What do we gain from this setup?

Edits:

  1. Somehow, this question is being interpreted as a complaint. It’s not a complaint. As a user, I don’t care how the language is designed as long as it has a good user experience, but the curious part of my mind always wants to know why things are the way they are. Maybe another way to phrase my question: Is this decision to rely more on meta-programming responsible for some of the good UX we get in Rust? And if so, how?
  2. I’m using meta-programming to mean code that generates code in the original language. So if I’m programming in Rust, that would be code that generate more Rust code. This excludes compilation where Rust gets converted into assembly or any other intermediate representation.
  • TehPers@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4·
    4 days ago

    Part of why Python can do this is that it runs completely differently from Rust. Python is interpreted and can run completely arbitrary code at runtime. It’s possible to exec arbitrary Python.

    Rust is compiled ahead of time. Once compiled, aside from inspecting how the output looks and what symbol names it uses, there’s nothing that ties the output to Rust. At runtime, there is nothing to compile new arbitrary code, and compiling at runtime would be slow anyway. There is no interpreter built into the application or required to run it either.

    This is also why C, C++, and many other compiled languages can’t execute new arbitrary code at runtime.