Rust's Type System Is Turing-Complete: Type-Level Programming in Rust

Hey I'm the person who raised the question (and I work on Rust, mainly on the trait system discussed in this post). I agree with the author that while this is interesting, for users it doesn't matter much. In particular, the folks (with respect) pontificating about whether this is a good or bad thing are quite exagerating its consequences. In practice, you can neither conveniently use this property for metaprogramming, nor will you ever get a nonterminal typechecking (not only…

The article is fascinating and I love fun stuff like this, but the discussion is a bit off the rails. There are a lot of things that are accidentally Turing complete. Turing complete is not synonymous with complicated and unwieldy to use. I mean, okay, maybe if you are doing the stuff that the author is doing it is complicated and unwieldy - in fact to the point that you would never do it in the first place. But Turing…