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At this point in history it should be more or less apparent that "here's a gun you can shoot your foot with, just don't do it lol" is not a viable strategy. It'

At this point in history it should be more or less apparent that "here's a gun you can shoot your foot with, just don't do it lol" is not a viable strategy. It's the strategy of the C devs whose memory safety bugs and buffer overflow mistakes we still find to this day, in a number of popular and very widely used programs. ...Nah. We shouldn't go back (and I am not saying you claim so, I am kind of just developing the thought here). Let's have memory safety and algebraic data types and maybe pluggable GC runtimes (if lifetime management proves too difficult which it has at times; not every task is perfectly suited for Rust's borrow checker) and async, and any other goodies that help us solve real problems, and let's not dream of a simpler life. That "simpler life" has failed. We should acknowledge that and move on and work with the reality in front of us. Rust's lifetime management and async runtime(s) can be maddeningly difficult but after being on all parts of the spectrum -- from bash scripts and JS Wild West projects to Rust -- I confidently claim that the more strictness the better. ...Though I wouldn't refuse Rust having compile times like those of Golang and OCaml, can't deny it.

eru 4y ago
I mostly agree with you. > At this point in history it should be more or less apparent that "here's a gun you can shoot your foot with, just don't do it lol" is not a viable strategy. However in the case of Haskell, manually mucking around with mutable aliases, references and pointers is culturally similar to using unsafe in Rust. By default in Haskell you are using immutable variables. And if you have multiple threads and want to share mutable state, you typically use software transactional memory. > ...Though I wouldn't refuse Rust having compile times like those of Golang and OCaml, can't deny it. Well, Golang has quick compile times, partially because it makes the human do half of the compiler's job. OCaml is indeed something that's more worth aspiring, too. As a compromise, I found that `cargo check` is much quicker than a build and does most of what I need when developing: most of the time, I don't actually care about the resulting binary, I just want the compiler to tell me quickly whether I introduced any errors it can detect.

eru 4y ago

I mostly agree with you. > At this point in history it should be more or less apparent that "here's a gun you can shoot your foot with, just don't do it lol" is not a viable strategy. However in the case of Haskell, manually mucking around with mutable aliases, references and pointers is culturally similar to using unsafe in Rust. By default in Haskell you are using immutable variables. And if you have multiple threads and want to share mutable state, you typically use software transactional memory. > ...Though I wouldn't refuse Rust having compile times like those of Golang and OCaml, can't deny it. Well, Golang has quick compile times, partially because it makes the human do half of the compiler's job. OCaml is indeed something that's more worth aspiring, too. As a compromise, I found that `cargo check` is much quicker than a build and does most of what I need when developing: most of the time, I don't actually care about the resulting binary, I just want the compiler to tell me quickly whether I introduced any errors it can detect.