this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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Rust

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Is it just me, or does Rust feel much more bare-bones than other languages? I just started learning it recently and this is the one thing that stood out to me, much more so than the memory management business. A lot of things that would normally be part of the language has to be achieved through meta-programming in Rust.

Is this a deliberate design choice? What do we gain from this setup?


Edits:

  1. Somehow, this question is being interpreted as a complaint. It's not a complaint. As a user, I don't care how the language is designed as long as it has a good user experience, but the curious part of my mind always wants to know why things are the way they are. Maybe another way to phrase my question: Is this decision to rely more on meta-programming responsible for some of the good UX we get in Rust? And if so, how?
  2. I'm using meta-programming to mean code that generates code in the original language. So if I'm programming in Rust, that would be code that generate more Rust code. This excludes compilation where Rust gets converted into assembly or any other intermediate representation.
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[–] hosaka@programming.dev 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

For functions that want to accept variadic arguments in C/Cpp

[–] RavuAlHemio@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Yup; I was referring to their implementation being dark magic, depending on calling convention, argument type, argument order and possibly other properties specific to the processor’s instruction set…

“If you think you understand va_*, you don’t.”

[–] hosaka@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah, didn't catch your sarcasm there :D

[–] BB_C@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago

I was just referring to the fact that they are macros.