I have been trying out Rust in contests and I'm curious about other people's impressions of the language, in comparison with C++. In particular I am interested in the possibility for building higher abstractions, and for better error detection.

C++ definitely has the potential to be error-prone, but I became much more consistent with it once I started using an LSP that shows me warnings/errors as I type. That plus avoiding global variables. Now I feel like almost all of my errors are logic-based rather than due to the unsafety of the language.

Here are some of my first impressions from using Rust to solve some contest problems.

Things I enjoyed:

• iterators, map, filter, etc. I feel like the syntax is often cleaner than C++, where I would almost always default to mutable variables instead.

• Type inference is usually good

• Lightweight tuple and array syntax

• Ranges

• "const" is default

• Automatic error tracing when compiling in debug mode

Dislikes/annoyances:

• Recursive functions. This is the big one. In C++, recursive lambdas (with a Y combinator) are very convenient and allow for things like DFS without passing in a million parameters (and without global variables).

• Index has to be usize

• Casting to and from references

• The borrow checker doesn't seem to be that useful for contest problems

I'm interested in what else the language can offer! Looking forward for Egor to weigh in.