> I've been wondering lately whether a new spatial approach can yet again simplify matters. This is indeed the case! Rust's borrow checking is the first step t

> I've been wondering lately whether a new spatial approach can yet again simplify matters. This is indeed the case! Rust's borrow checking is the first step towards "regions", a more general and more flexible model. TL;DR: We convey to the compiler that a certain set of objects are conceptually in the same region, and then we can turn immutable the entire region at once. Pony and Forty2 [0] first came up with them, and Vale is building them into the language as first-class citizens and blending them with borrow-checker like semantics [1] to eliminate memory safety overhead. It helps us do patterns that more traditional borrow checking has trouble with: observers, dependency references, delegates, callbacks, some forms of RAII, and intrusive data structures. This is mostly because regions get a lot of the borrow checker's benefits while still allowing mutable aliasing. [0] http://forty2.is/ http://forty2.is/ [1] https://verdagon.dev/blog/zero-cost-memory-safety-regions-part-1-immutable-borrowing https://verdagon.dev/blog/zero-cost-memory-safety-regions-pa...