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Good point: my assertion in grandparent that "Rust does have affine types" is wrong. Do you agree with my belief that it is significantly less likely the borro

Good point: my assertion in grandparent that "Rust does have affine types" is wrong. Do you agree with my belief that it is significantly less likely the borrow checker would've been invented if programming-languages researchers hadn't paid a lot of attention to linear and affine types? Even though a Rust coder can take as many non-mutable references to a location in memory as he wants, there are certain operations (e.g., move) that the coder can only do once to it, and the inventor(s) (probably Graydon Hoare) of the borrow checker must have explored that part of the design space extensively, and it seems to me it would have been very non-obvious that it was worth exploring extensively to someone not influenced directly or indirectly by Girard.

cwzwarich 7y ago
> Do you agree with my belief that it is significantly less likely the borrow checker would've been invented if programming-languages researchers hadn't paid a lot of attention to linear and affine types? As I mentioned in another comment, the concept of borrowing was already present in the earliest applications of linear types to programming languages. There was contemporaneous research into region systems for ML. Later languages like Vault and Cyclone combined these two ideas, using substructural types to manage regions. From a language feature perspective, the biggest innovation of Rust was integrating the ideas from Cyclone and other research languages with the emerging C++11 style of programming with implicit destructors, move semantics, and smart pointers.