I've attended a talk on the Rust programming language, and I've had a couple of realizations.
1. The new and interesting thing in Rust is its enforcement of "borrowing" vs "consumption" in the references, and the separation of the code that strictly follows the straight-jacketed "safe" code from the "unsafe" code. The rest of it seems to be substandard compared to C++.
I think that most real code will end up having both the "safe" and "unsafe" parts, because the purely "safe" version is conductive only to writing the COBOL-like programs. But the separation forces you to encapsulate the unsafe parts, keep them separate and small, and then the rest of the code would just rely on them instead of spreading unsafety all over the place.
But can the same concept be imported into C++? I think it can. There actually already are the syntactic means to express the borrowing and consumption in C++. Borrowing is "const &", and consumption is "&&". So all we need is a way to ban the plain "&" and "*" in the parts of the code that we decree "safe".
2. A thing that looks annoying in Rust is its lack of classes, it has traits instead. In this respect it's similar to Go (just as annoying) and the C++ templates (in an implicit way, and with its own even worse challenges). It obviously works but in an annoying way.
So what is annoying? That the definitions of Rust functions end up containing a list of traits for each argument: Trait1 + Trait2 + Trait3. The same applies to Go. C++ is actually less annoying because it doesn't even require you to define the traits as such, it just uses them in templates. It pays for that by very non-obvious error messages when a trait is missing, but at least you don't have to drag this list around.
But what is a class (or an interface)? An interface is a list of methods. And each method is also a trait. So when we define an interface, what we really do is write
InterfaceA = TraitA1 + TraitA2 + TraitA3
If we could do all this "trait arithmetic", all the annoyance would go away. I wonder if Rust already supports something like that, just it wasn't mentioned in the talk?
