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> I wish there was a modern language that took all the good non-manual-memory-management things from Rust and added a GC and some immutable data structures. Th

> I wish there was a modern language that took all the good non-manual-memory-management things from Rust and added a GC and some immutable data structures. This basically describes all of the recent ML – perhaps more specifically OCaml – influenced languages like Kotlin, Swift, F#. (Rust is also heavily influenced by OCaml but its distinguishing feature is manual memory management with lifetimes.) I do wish we had a good Linux/Posix option with as good of a package manager as Rust's cargo. Kotlin and Swift have some support but are largely focussed on the JVM and MacOS respectively. OCaml itself is of course an option here but its syntax and smaller ecosystem is a stumbling block. Reason is an attempt at a more familiar syntax for OCaml but that community is mostly focussed on transpilation to JavaScript with ReScript.

spion 4y ago
Its not quite that simple. Some of the things that Rust gets right are subtle, but typically punted by many other languages. Documentation containing fully working examples due to thos examples being run by doctests, for example, is kinda rare. Here is another more subtle but important example: flexible API for error conversion, powerful language features and macros together enable the language, in conjunction with libraries like https://docs.rs/anyhow/latest/anyhow/ https://docs.rs/anyhow/latest/anyhow/ which gets you the best of all worlds in error handling: concise `?` operator for writing error handling code, eas to add additional message context (using `with_context` from anyhohw), differentiating between functions that can and cannot throw in the types (Result<T>), and the ability to get exception style backtraces from Result, too (that last one seems to be rare) Another subtle QoL which is often overlooked when implementing macros: `compile_error!` (and soon even more powerful diagnostic API). With that, macros can report custom errors back to the programmer via the compiler and language service, rather than becoming an incomprehensible mess. For example, the peg parser macro will mark errors with infinite left-recursive rules that don't have caching set up with custom error messages.
- spion 4y ago
  And yeah I totally agree with you regarding `cargo`, in my mind thats also one of the things that don't seem to be related to the language but the quality of life improvements end up being huge.

spion 4y ago

Its not quite that simple. Some of the things that Rust gets right are subtle, but typically punted by many other languages. Documentation containing fully working examples due to thos examples being run by doctests, for example, is kinda rare. Here is another more subtle but important example: flexible API for error conversion, powerful language features and macros together enable the language, in conjunction with libraries like https://docs.rs/anyhow/latest/anyhow/ https://docs.rs/anyhow/latest/anyhow/ which gets you the best of all worlds in error handling: concise `?` operator for writing error handling code, eas to add additional message context (using `with_context` from anyhohw), differentiating between functions that can and cannot throw in the types (Result<T>), and the ability to get exception style backtraces from Result, too (that last one seems to be rare) Another subtle QoL which is often overlooked when implementing macros: `compile_error!` (and soon even more powerful diagnostic API). With that, macros can report custom errors back to the programmer via the compiler and language service, rather than becoming an incomprehensible mess. For example, the peg parser macro will mark errors with infinite left-recursive rules that don't have caching set up with custom error messages.

spion 4y ago
And yeah I totally agree with you regarding `cargo`, in my mind thats also one of the things that don't seem to be related to the language but the quality of life improvements end up being huge.