Rust is a programming language that provides strong safety properties, but does so at a usability cost. We conducted an observational study of Rust learners and a thematic analysis of StackOverflow posts about Rust to identify opportunities for improvement in Rust’s usability. Key challenges that we observed included syntactic challenges posed by the ? operator, block-terminal statements, and automatic dereferencing; late delivery of error messages; and the opacity of Rust errors resulting in programmers being unable to identify whether their partial fixes represented progress. We describe a collection of opportunities for improvement that leverage the compiler and the IDE.

[ .pdf ]

@inproceedings{coblenz23rust,
  title = {A Multimodal Study of Challenges Using {Rust}},
  author = {Michael Coblenz and April Porter and Varun Das and Teja Nallagorla and Michael Hicks},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on the Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU)},
  year = 2023,
  month = feb
}

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