> This is abusing the borrow checker as a bad linter. Range undermines the story of lifetimes and ownership, making the borrow checker feel arbitrary.
This is the key part. You really shouldn't try to "censor" the math to "help" users. It just causes more pain.
I'm recently been annoyed with the push back against "DynSized" again, which IMO is a symptom of the same thing. "DynSized" is the natural way to generalize Rust's notions of size/layout so we can implement custom DSTs, but people are scared of another ?Trait making Rust "more difficult" or "more complicated", so we're going to get some crapped up epicycles plan if we get anything at all.
-------
Incidentally the Jonothan blow quote below is full 180 misapplied. The issue is people trying to dial back something, not push it to it's natural conclusion, because they don't like the natural conclusion. Too bad, don't do that.
Are you sure about this? I've heard the quote applied specifically in the context of RAII, where he complained that there is no such thing as a generalized "resource", and that the same mechanism for handling memory access should not be used for file handles and texture maps. I don't have a link right now, but I'm pretty sure it was in his first "ideas for a programming language for games" video back in 2014. Seems to me like this range situation would be fairly analogous to that.
I remember his video on RAII. My opinion on his take is that it's pure tosh. Incidentally I also hate Golang... He's used to languages with thin abstractions like C where it's basically impossible to get anything done fast without dissociating allocation and creation (and in particular, allocation and mutation).
Modern languages and Rust specifically address that problem by letting you write clean programs with the illusion of immutability but still basically mutating state all over the place in the actual executable.
And that's if you care that much about speed. Even slow Rust is pretty fast, and the readability/consistency/maintainability benefit of RAII is immense compared to the tiny speed gains.
This is the key part. You really shouldn't try to "censor" the math to "help" users. It just causes more pain.
I'm recently been annoyed with the push back against "DynSized" again, which IMO is a symptom of the same thing. "DynSized" is the natural way to generalize Rust's notions of size/layout so we can implement custom DSTs, but people are scared of another ?Trait making Rust "more difficult" or "more complicated", so we're going to get some crapped up epicycles plan if we get anything at all.
-------
Incidentally the Jonothan blow quote below is full 180 misapplied. The issue is people trying to dial back something, not push it to it's natural conclusion, because they don't like the natural conclusion. Too bad, don't do that.