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I write Rust and enjoy spending less time on memory bugs. I am not blind to the benefits. But I’d struggle to match your claim along the lines of, “games and D
by modernerd 4y ago
I write Rust and enjoy spending less time on memory bugs. I am not blind to the benefits.
But I’d struggle to match your claim along the lines of, “games and DAW developers would be more productive with a memory-safe language because they wouldn’t have to debug memory safety bugs”.
Memory safety in Rust might be “zero-cost” but it isn’t free.
Languages like Zig accept that developers spend time on things outside of memory bugs, seek to improve their productivity and quality of life in those areas, and trust that devs will pick tools that reduce their largest pain points, be that Zig or Rust or Odin.
The best response we as an industry can have to this is to say, “wow, I’m glad so many hard-working people feel motivated to bring some of those bars down on the Ways Software Sucks Chart, let’s give them our money and our support!”
To me that’s healthier than assuming that everyone’s Suck Chart looks the same, tapping the memory safety bar over on the right and saying, “sheesh, anyone using a language that doesn’t fix this bar just doesn’t realise how productive they could be!”.
It also detracts from celebrating the engineering achievement here. Two people deleted their creaking C++ compiler by writing a custom interpreter in two weeks so their language can be bootstrapped using only system-installed tools. It is uncharitable to insinuate that they needn’t have bothered because if you really care about productivity you wouldn’t use languages like their one anyway.
- pjmlp 4y agoExcept that other than comptime, Zig is basically Modula-2 with C like syntax, and we already had plenty of attempts at it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago“other than comptime” is a really big chunk of the language though. Without it you can’t even use generic types for example. Zig’s “compile-time metaprogramming as just normal programming” philosophy is what really makes me looking forward for the language. It’s a feature than no other low-level language has fully scratched the itch yet (Rust still use an ad-hoc mix of hygienic and procedural macros for many compile-time things, while having a complex generics system to complicate things even more. Nim has a better story towards metaprogramming but it still feels less elegant. Jai’s metaprogramming facilities are a bit more ambitious what Zig is doing, but it’s not released to the public yet, so there’s that.)
- pjmlp 4y agoEcosystems matter more than single language features.