tfw you wish you could control mutual recursion in Rust like you do in SML/OCaml/Coq/Agda. 😞
Conversation
How come?
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I’m always silly and end up confusing cycles in my modules and messing up my own intended design. Crates are a nice way to prevent that, but it’s heavy weight, and forces you to expose internal architectural decisions to the package ecosystem.
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Yeah crates are obviously too heavy for this purpose. I was just surprised because I don't think "I wish I could have prevented myself from accidentally calling this function mutually-recursively" is a problem I've ever (noticed & remember that I) had.
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Yeah I'm more talking about mutual dependencies between types and functions in different modules. That can be harder to force yourself to be tidy with.
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Oh I see -- your issue isn't so much with (mutually) recursive functions, but with recursive modules/imports. (IIRC, SML and/or OCaml have explicit control over *both* of these things?)
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I understand that better. I do have the intuition that modules and packages should "behave the same" (I'm reaching for a word, which might be "scale-invariance"?). OTOH, *not* having recursive modules can also be supremely annoying (Haskell, I'm looking at you).
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Replying to
Yeah - it's kind of weird. In Agda and Lean you end up accumulating interdependent modules in layers, and end up with a final module that re-exports everything. But that can be annoying.
I kind of wonder what it would look like with structured editing without the concept of a file...
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If I had a dollar for every time I tried to look at an interesting-seeming Haskell project on github, discovered it was a nest of re-re-exports with the actual code scattered somewhere out in the leaves, and gave up, I'd have several dollars.
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