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So, you have some good responses and I want to repeat that this is all just my opinion and personal experience. Thanks for the reply.
I won't address your criticism of our design because you don't know the details (and I'm not going into them). But we're not stupid people. Not collectively, at least... :) This attitude of "I've thought for three whole minutes and I can't see why anybody would ever want this, so the people telling me they want this are wrong" is kind of emblematic of Rust's design vs C++'s.
I agree it's nice that Rust solves the aliasing problem. They didn't have to solve it by confusing mutability and exclusivity, though! It's like if a plumber comes and fixes my toilet, but breaks some windows on the way out. The correct response to "hey, why did you break the windows" isn't "look, the toilet's fixed!"
You can if you can access it, yeah, but it'd be weird for the C++ object to give a user access to raw internal pointers. Note that in most cases you're also limited on what methods (including getters/setters) you can call on a "const MyStruct" - whether a function is read-only or not can be explicitly declared in its signature. Now, you don't have to use const at all in a library. Or you could use it but then have the same "internal mutability" as Rust - but why would you do that? The point of the keyword's existence is to allow programmers to positively assert "this is what a read-only version of this object looks like". Which is powerful and important and should be easier than it is in Rust.
If your complaint is that "const" doesn't force the C++ programmer to be safe, you're right about that. C++ gives options, not restrictions, and for bad programmers it is indeed full of footguns. My praise of "const" is due to what it can be in the hands of good programmers - and I would have loved it if Rust introduced the keyword but applied its stringent safety guarantees to it.
But the heap example I give is the exact opposite of this. I want access to the inside type (the number) - I never want to think about the heap's operator except at initialization - but instead I'm being forced to wrap it everywhere. Now, it's not entirely fair to compare Rust's library with C++'s STL. Like you said, "it can be annoying to find gaps like this in the language that takes years to close" - Rust is young, and the STL is the result of decades of finetuning/nitpicking work from thousands of people. I agree that, in the future, something like Rust's bad heap implementation might be a non-problem.
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