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But if equipping Rust with a GC makes it as easy as Python, Rust could become the language of choice because you have the low entry barrier and the option of ma

But if equipping Rust with a GC makes it as easy as Python, Rust could become the language of choice because you have the low entry barrier and the option of making your code much more robust within the same language. That seems like a big win for everyone. I think there can be an unproductive temptation to use a language as gatekeeper of a culture. If you want a culture with shared values about how to do things, there are plenty of ways to do that other than keeping the language from accommodating anyone outside of that culture. And your culture will be more accessible to people who genuinely belong in it, if it's visible from the places they already live (e.g. the Rust language). The languages you dislike are popular because they make it easy for everyone to contribute, and as a result they have a bigger community and, perhaps even more importantly, a greater breadth and depth of libraries and packages than competitors. Rust could be competitive with these languages if it had a low floor and a high ceiling of admissible code quality and sophistication.

ssokolow 5y ago
Appealing in theory, but not necessarily attainable in practice. I use Rust to write CPython extensions... it's a well-known fact that GCs are solitary creatures and you're in for a lot of hassle if you want two different GCs to play nicely together. I use Rust for all sorts of things because I like the high floor Rust sets for the crates I depend on, and I pair that with being more likely to rewrite or find an alternative for a dependency that uses `unsafe` in a context I don't feel it's merited. A lot of what the borrow checker brings is fundamentally about requiring the programmer to be more precise about what they intend, rather than patching the cracks with extra CPU/RAM or waiting until runtime and hoping it won't come up. My main concern here is the risk of Rust running into a more minor version of what happened to D, where you effectively had two language ecosystems and the one with a GC and all the libraries wasn't an alternative to C or C++ and wasn't a very appealing alternative to Java.

ssokolow 5y ago

Appealing in theory, but not necessarily attainable in practice. I use Rust to write CPython extensions... it's a well-known fact that GCs are solitary creatures and you're in for a lot of hassle if you want two different GCs to play nicely together. I use Rust for all sorts of things because I like the high floor Rust sets for the crates I depend on, and I pair that with being more likely to rewrite or find an alternative for a dependency that uses `unsafe` in a context I don't feel it's merited. A lot of what the borrow checker brings is fundamentally about requiring the programmer to be more precise about what they intend, rather than patching the cracks with extra CPU/RAM or waiting until runtime and hoping it won't come up. My main concern here is the risk of Rust running into a more minor version of what happened to D, where you effectively had two language ecosystems and the one with a GC and all the libraries wasn't an alternative to C or C++ and wasn't a very appealing alternative to Java.