Occasionally managing lifetimes can be a headache, but it's not nearly as often as most people seem to think it is, and is precisely the sort of thing you should be concerned with fully understanding in a C-equivalent anyway.
Yes, but the environment for this specific program is the linux kernel, where most of the high level libraries for data structures already exist in C already, and the Rust code is pretty constrained due to the existing limitations. A lot of, what I assume to be, data structure fanciness in Rust comes through non standard crates, and the kernel doesn't allow that as far as I remember.
I'd argue equivalent C programs are usually undercomplicated due to missing safety requirements.
Rust definitely makes some easy things more difficult but on the flip side it arguably makes very difficult things easier (to get right with fewer guinea pigs).
"X written in Y" advertises two things:
- language X turned out to be a reasonably good language for writing program Y
- program Y is likely to be good at things that X is known for making easy to do
Both of these seem useful, if prone to motivated reasoning.
And once it compiles, the way you achieved it may be suboptimal, complicated, buggy, and even unsafe due to logic bugs.
My fairly large projects written in Rust have slowly become unmaintainable. There 's too much code that's just there to work around the borrow checker, and hurt readability. There are memory leaks and dead locks that I've never been able to pinpoint. There are dependencies that I stopped updating a long time ago due to constant breaking API changes. There are "unsafe" and "transmute" keywords because I couldn't figure out how to go through many layers of abstraction just to copy a type that resolves to an integer into another type that resolves to the same integer.
I've been writing Rust code for 10+ years and I still appreciate it for some projects, but I also really enjoy going back to C for the control, flexibility and expressiveness it offers, not to mention better performance. After Rust, it feels like fresh air.
I think that if you avoid reaching for `unsafe` every time you're frustrated with the type system, you'll have a much better time.
