I think the biggest thing I've struggled with learning Rust is what I will call, for lack of a better phrase, "shit rustc says". Reading Steve Klabnik's tutorial and some blog posts about earlier versions of rust, it's clear that the error messages have improved dramatically since earlier versions, but I still think there's quite a bit of room for improvement.
For an example of how errors could be presented better, I'd look to Facebook's typed PHP language, Hack, which was presented at Strange Loop 2013. Hack supports a pretty fancy type system for a gradually typed language, complete with subtyping (which PHP necessitates) and non-nullable types. Hack uses a story format for error messages in order to make them easier to understand: File "test.php", line 6, characters 10-11: Invalid return type File "test.php", line 3, characters 24-26: This is an int File "test.php", line 5, characters 10-11: It is incompatible with a string If rustc could do something like this, I think it'd make the errors a lot easier to understand and provide for easier debugging. For more information on Hack, check out the talk on InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/php-history Or the slides: https://github.com/strangeloop/StrangeLoop2013/blob/master/slides/sessions/Adams-TakingPHPSeriously.pdf -- Tony Arcieri
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