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This is technically true, but somewhat misleading. The borrow checker was added pre1.0, and originally wasn't known to be possible to rely on it exclusively for

This is technically true, but somewhat misleading. The borrow checker was added pre1.0, and originally wasn't known to be possible to rely on it exclusively for memory management. It was bolted on later, but it changed the language so much that if Rust had been 1.x, after the change we'd be calling the current iteration of Rust "2.0". As such, any production ready language that attempts the same gambit will have to be ready for a painful split that would make the Python 3 migration look like a walk in the park.

fbdab103 4y ago
The problem with the Python transition is that the language is so flexible that it becomes challenging to understand if/where/when any code will be impacted by a change. Unit testing becomes the static type checker (less so now that Python typing is spreading). For a statically compiled, AOT language, it should be easier to migrate the bulk of the code and identify the hairy bits. Which is not to say it would be easy or fast, but I think Python, Perl or other flexible languages are worst case examples for breaking language change migrations.