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It's one of dozens if not hundreds of memory-safe languages. The false marketing claim that Rust somehow invented it is absolutely infuriating.

albrewer 4y ago
For one reason or another, those other languages didn't take off and Rust did. Language adoption isn't just about technical merits (although those have to be there). The ecosystem, tooling, core team, learning resources, and overall community have to be there, too. To your point - if I want to get started in another language that is 1) statically compiled, 2) non-garbage collected, and 3) memory-safe by design, as far as I can tell my only other mainstream options are Swift / Objective-C, Ada / SPARK, and Nim. I don't see nearly as much activity in those language's open source ecosystems, and "basic" libraries might not even exist due to the small communities.
- TheFlyingFish 4y ago
  Nim is garbage-collected, actually. It has an option to disable garbage-collection (though I thought there was talk of removing that at some point) but then it just leaks memory, it doesn't have a comprehensive system for GC-less memory management like Rust does.
  - Tozen 4y ago
    Nim is also not the only language with the combination of optional GC and memory management. Dlang and Vlang are two others, where the GC is optional and are compiled languages. Golang appears to be more seriously experimenting with various forms of manual memory management, so at some point, we might see it offer a choice of memory management options too. In fact, Dlang even has an experimental borrow checker. Care should be taken to not be in so much of a bubble, to not realize that other languages have viable solutions too or are developing alternatives to what's presently available. If our choice for one or the other, is more a matter of personal preference, it would arguably be better to acknowledge such.
  - planetis 4y ago
    Friend nim does have gc less memory management https://nim-lang.org/blog/2020/10/15/introduction-to-arc-orc-in-nim.html https://nim-lang.org/blog/2020/10/15/introduction-to-arc-orc... and can also collect cycles similar to PHP. Imo the new system is more intuitive than rust's which will be a huge win when it comes out (soon).
roarcher 4y ago
> The false marketing claim that Rust somehow invented it is absolutely infuriating. This is the second time I've seen someone say this in the last week or so, but I've never seen this claim in the wild, and certainly not by Rust's core team or organization. It's also not a secret that Rust's memory management is heavily influenced by Cyclone. Can you show an example of someone making this claim?

albrewer 4y ago

For one reason or another, those other languages didn't take off and Rust did. Language adoption isn't just about technical merits (although those have to be there). The ecosystem, tooling, core team, learning resources, and overall community have to be there, too. To your point - if I want to get started in another language that is 1) statically compiled, 2) non-garbage collected, and 3) memory-safe by design, as far as I can tell my only other mainstream options are Swift / Objective-C, Ada / SPARK, and Nim. I don't see nearly as much activity in those language's open source ecosystems, and "basic" libraries might not even exist due to the small communities.

TheFlyingFish 4y ago
Nim is garbage-collected, actually. It has an option to disable garbage-collection (though I thought there was talk of removing that at some point) but then it just leaks memory, it doesn't have a comprehensive system for GC-less memory management like Rust does.
- Tozen 4y ago
  Nim is also not the only language with the combination of optional GC and memory management. Dlang and Vlang are two others, where the GC is optional and are compiled languages. Golang appears to be more seriously experimenting with various forms of manual memory management, so at some point, we might see it offer a choice of memory management options too. In fact, Dlang even has an experimental borrow checker. Care should be taken to not be in so much of a bubble, to not realize that other languages have viable solutions too or are developing alternatives to what's presently available. If our choice for one or the other, is more a matter of personal preference, it would arguably be better to acknowledge such.
- planetis 4y ago
  Friend nim does have gc less memory management https://nim-lang.org/blog/2020/10/15/introduction-to-arc-orc-in-nim.html https://nim-lang.org/blog/2020/10/15/introduction-to-arc-orc... and can also collect cycles similar to PHP. Imo the new system is more intuitive than rust's which will be a huge win when it comes out (soon).

roarcher 4y ago

> The false marketing claim that Rust somehow invented it is absolutely infuriating. This is the second time I've seen someone say this in the last week or so, but I've never seen this claim in the wild, and certainly not by Rust's core team or organization. It's also not a secret that Rust's memory management is heavily influenced by Cyclone. Can you show an example of someone making this claim?