To be honest I don't buy it. The biggest problem with translating programs to Rust, IMO anyway, isn't actually dealing with the chasm between mentalities regarding programming language design. I don't disagree that Rust intentionally goes a different way in many regards; obviously it focuses on composition over inheritance, and takes more inspiration from ML. But still, that isn't really the problem. It really does come down to the fact that appeasing the borrow checker is hard. It only accepts valid, well-formed programs according to its rules, but it rejects a ton of completely safe things in the process. It's a tradeoff.
Literally just not being able to easily and efficiently express interior mutability completely changes how you design both code and APIs. Unsurprisingly, since they evolved in parallel, C++ is pretty well-suited for old-school widget toolkits like Qt, but Rust is not. It's not just a matter of having to retool things for composition... The entire view and data model just doesn't work very well. Instead with Rust you wind up seeing the vast majority of toolkits go for immediate mode or functional reactive flow designs that look like React.
I'm not Rust expert but this is basically my opinion on what's really going on. I don't think it's a hatred of C/C++, especially since I think C especially translates to Rust perfectly well ignoring the borrow checker. Rust found one way to do safety and it does reject some valid code and make some patterns awkward or necessarily inefficient... There are others but it is clearly an area of open research.
> Literally just not being able to easily and efficiently express interior mutability completely changes how you design both code and APIs.
The issue is that fundamentally interior mutability is hard to reason about. It requires a lot more temporal reasoning to make sense of and ensure the safety of. Leaning into the type system Rust has does make interior mutability harder when you have "temporally based" safety arguments. It's a lot easier to reason about correctness in the model Rust uses.
Have you looked at the godot-rust bindings? They've gone very far to make the Godot object system work well going between C++ Godot code and Rust. I would love to see that model adapted to Gtk.
Literally just not being able to easily and efficiently express interior mutability completely changes how you design both code and APIs. Unsurprisingly, since they evolved in parallel, C++ is pretty well-suited for old-school widget toolkits like Qt, but Rust is not. It's not just a matter of having to retool things for composition... The entire view and data model just doesn't work very well. Instead with Rust you wind up seeing the vast majority of toolkits go for immediate mode or functional reactive flow designs that look like React.
I'm not Rust expert but this is basically my opinion on what's really going on. I don't think it's a hatred of C/C++, especially since I think C especially translates to Rust perfectly well ignoring the borrow checker. Rust found one way to do safety and it does reject some valid code and make some patterns awkward or necessarily inefficient... There are others but it is clearly an area of open research.