> What's the hardest thing for a C programmer to unlearn when moving to Rust?
One thing that stood out to me going this direction is it's really hard to write hackish or intentionally-broken code in order to try to explore implementation options or debug an issue or test an algorithm. Rust requires you to handle error cases, and all possible values in cases, and is strict about memory access and stuff. But sometimes I just want to shove these bytes into this thing and see what happens, or hack in an early return or something, or half-implement this API to see if it "feels right" before committing to a full implementation, and Rust's enforced best practices stop me doing that.
(To be clear, I like Rust. This is just one thing that trips me up coming from C.)
One thing that stood out to me going this direction is it's really hard to write hackish or intentionally-broken code in order to try to explore implementation options or debug an issue or test an algorithm. Rust requires you to handle error cases, and all possible values in cases, and is strict about memory access and stuff. But sometimes I just want to shove these bytes into this thing and see what happens, or hack in an early return or something, or half-implement this API to see if it "feels right" before committing to a full implementation, and Rust's enforced best practices stop me doing that.
(To be clear, I like Rust. This is just one thing that trips me up coming from C.)