Subsubtopic: dereferencing and strings (especially interop)

[DrizztVD1]

The relevant quotes from the first post are shown below. This topic derives from (Wrong) Direction of Rust

@peter_bertok

If a gun was pointed to my head and I was forced to pick one thing that I could point to in Rust that I feel is a total failure and stops me using it is its strings. They are by default mutable, a concrete type instead of a trait, and there are way too many variants of it, not even including char arrays and the like that turn up in interop. I feel like this is a catastrophic design mistake. C++ got this wrong and Java and C# got it right by having one immutable string type.

@Vitalyd

Automatic dereferencing is just one example in this category. Someone got lazy and decided they didn’t like typing asterixes all over the place and added an ill-thought layer of magic for their own convenience that is now a landmine for even the most trivial manual refactorings. Combined with the over-use of macros, I just don’t see how the language will ever get IDE support equivalent to what Java had 15 years ago, let alone today.

I suspect you’re referring to deref coercions rather than auto deref; the latter is completely useful and obviates lots of noise that would ensue otherwise. Deref coercions, however, can appear magical in the beginning, particularly when coupled with heavy type inference use. They’re less magical with some experience, and in fact a useful feature.