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I guess it depends what you think is the real core of Rust - for me, Rust's primary innovation and primary differentiation point is giving you safe memory manag
by mathw 7y ago
I guess it depends what you think is the real core of Rust - for me, Rust's primary innovation and primary differentiation point is giving you safe memory management without a garbage collector. Anything that steps away from it (so stepping away from the borrow checker, lifetimes and so on) becomes something that isn't Rust anymore.
After all, just about everything else in Rust is in Haskell.
- mrfredward 7y agoThe borrow checker is undoubtedly the core innovation of Rust, but it's not what people new to the language want. When I first came to rust, I was looking for a c++ alternative that had similar syntax and low level power, but also a sane standard library and modern language features like closures. When I first learned about the borrowchecker I thought it was brilliant. Then I spent some time fighting it and I hated it. Then I learned to love it...until I got backed in to a corner and had to re-architect a project I'd been working on for months. Now I have mixed feelings about it. So I agree Rust isn't Rust without the borrowchecker, but I empathize with all the noobs who want a rust without it because many people just want a language with some traction that fixes c++ past mistakes, and they end up getting a massive paradigm shift thrown at them instead.
- skohan 7y agoIt's surprising to me that a language hasn't emerged which is more purely a modernization of C. It seems like you could go a long way just keeping C's basic abstraction in place, reworking some of the clunky bits and adding some basic quality-of-life improvements from the past 30 years of language design.