Once you've used a compiler like Rust or Elm that actually provides suggestions for common solutions to these errors (effectively building the tribal knowledge of what the error "really means" into the compiler itself), it's hard to tolerate these cryptic errors that only really make sense to machines.
I often found Rust's errors completely confusing, even after chasing down the '--explain CrypticNNNNN' follow-up explainer. This was in 2019 — not some ancient version of Rust.
Yeah, Rust’s compiler errors are decent if you make simple mistakes but degrade to being about as bad as any other modern compiler’s once you start doing complicated things. Which isn’t horrible, but --explain isn’t really useful so it’s just wasting space on my screen.
Hmm, I wouldn’t call them confusing per se, they’re just not useful, and I don’t think any compiler has really solved this problem (but then again, generation of compiler error messages is not something I’m an expert in). Let’s say I forgot to put a “*” in front of something: the compiler’s error might be something like “xyz does not implement SomeTrait, here is a page explaining what traits are”. I’d be more than happy to file bugs for things like these but I have generally refrained from doing so because I am unsure if this is something that is possible to fix. If you’d like, I could file issues for things like this, but I’m genuinely curious to hear if there’s any strategies on improving these or work done in this area.
Let us determine if it's possible or not. The person who currently works on errors is of the opinion that any time the error isn't useful, it's a bug.
> I’m genuinely curious to hear if there’s any strategies on improving these or work done in this area.
It's just a ton of work. You look at what the compiler produces, look at what information you can have at that point, see if you can craft something better, and then ship. And then look at the next error.
> Let us determine if it's possible or not. The person who currently works on errors is of the opinion that any time the error isn't useful, it's a bug.
That's a fantastic attitude and I really appreciate that someone is working towards that goal, thanks.
> It's just a ton of work. You look at what the compiler produces, look at what information you can have at that point, see if you can craft something better, and then ship. And then look at the next error.
I have no issue with filing bugs about errors I think aren’t great, aside from the fact that I might not be able to suggest anything better…I’ll try it out the next time I see something.
I'll keep that in mind for future interaction with rustc, thanks. Just to double check, you are referring to Github issues on the rust-lang/rust repository, right?
