Item — HN Reader

The specific claim I'm making is that Rust has language (in the form of making it the default in `for` loops) and library (in the form of the `Iterator` trait) support for this pattern.

Further, Rust's monomorphizing approach to generics means that you can count on efficient code. Iterators over a slice typically elide the bounds checking, reliably.

Of course you can use these patterns in other languages, but you lose something, specifically, clarity and safety. I believe that's the reason you see them used all the time in Rust and rarely in C and C++.

1 comments

Yes, I agree with your original analysis completely - well thought out languages with a richer basic type zoo are generally much more pleasant to deal with than C++.

My answer was to the specific claim that an iterator using the "next" formulation would be hard to use in C++ - it's not, and it makes several pieces of code much nicer than using the default iteration scheme of raw index or pointer-hopping.

So, the intent was not to make a statement "we can do that in C++, Rust has no merit in this regard" but rather, "you should not shy away from this nice pattern if you are forced to use C++ in your daily work". This intent was not that obvious in the message's context, though.

And I misspoke in my initial comment; you could do it and be memory safe with Boost. Obviously iterators can be used in basically any language.

Total agreement, well said.