The Confessional Thread: Parts of Rust that I still don't get after all this time

[ZiCog]

@thor314

Wondering if someone who has been around longer knows why a different keyword wasn't chosen for shadowing, or if there's a thread somewhere to read more about that.

This has of course been discussed at length over the years:

Why shadowing is implicit?

I just realize shadowing variable is implicit. From my humble perspective, it can bring some mess is big functions. A lot of things are explicit in Rust, is there a particular reason why shadowing is not? I'm just curious. Thanks in advance!

When does Rust prefer to be implicit?

This is one of those examples where I think the wording could be better. async is arguably not implicit, because you had to type it -- it's not that returning something the implements Future just does the rewrite without being asked. I consider that very different from something like deref coercions, which are completely invisible.

Personally I like shadowing in Rust. It has proved useful. It's unlikely to cause bugs that don't show up almost immediately, at compile time or first testing.

I loath the the idea of adding more keywords and language complexity for such non-issues.