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It's not a dumb take at all. I have been using Rust for > 6 years now. A significant portion of my projects don't benefit strongly from the borrow checker (the

It's not a dumb take at all. I have been using Rust for > 6 years now. A significant portion of my projects don't benefit strongly from the borrow checker (the other ones massively do). I use Rust primarily because it has a solid type system, functional bent, and - most importantly - phenomenal tooling (cargo, rust-analyzer), package ecosystem, and developer UX. If OCaml/StandardML/Haskell/etc had anything close to the ergonomics and convenience of cargo for testing, setting up projects, adding deps, deploying them to any OS/platform, I would probably write about 30-40% less Rust. I'm not saying we should add GC to Rust - but I think there is space for a Rust+GC language (or just improved ecosystem and tooling for other functional langs)

pjmlp 3y ago
Like opam and stackage?
- shpongled 3y ago
  I'm familiar with both - but not really the same order of magnitude. crates.io lists >120k packages. opam has ~4500, and stackage ~3000. And the package ecosystem is only part of it. Admittedly, I haven't written any OCaml or Haskell in the last year or so, but my experience of just getting a new library or executable up and running isn't comparable to cargo either. But also hard to separate my strong familiarity with Rust from the comparison.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Quality matters more than quantity. I rather have one package that does it right, than 20 doing a different set of 80% from what is needed.
    - shpongled 3y ago
      Who wouldn't. But let's not pretend that stackage and crates.io are covering the same functionality space. As just one example: there are no OCaml or Haskell packages for natively reading or writing parquet files. There are at least 2 such packages for Rust.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Yeah, yet it doesn't matter to me, I don't even know what they are about. Likewise, despite crates.io, Rust is missing lots of stuff I miss from Java, C# and C++. Plenty of stuff isn't there yet.
bheadmaster 3y ago
> If OCaml/StandardML/Haskell/etc had anything close to the ergonomics and convenience of cargo for testing, setting up projects, adding deps, deploying them to any OS/platform, I would probably write about 30-40% less Rust. Ahem... Excuse me, sir, do you have time to talk about our lord and savior Robert Pike?
- shpongled 3y ago
  > solid type system Politely closes door in your face
  - bheadmaster 3y ago
    I personally enjoy working with Go's type system even more than Rust's. For example, implicit interfaces make code reuse much easier than Rust's traits.
    - shpongled 3y ago
      Lack of sum types is complete deal-breaker for me unfortunately.
      - bheadmaster 3y ago
        There's a proposal, for what it's worth: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/57644 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/57644 Although I'm curious, what is your use case that cannot be fulfilled by interfaces, but can with sum types?
        shpongled 3y ago
        `if err != nil` is the easiest example. Sum types allow you to express type-level OR. Structs/tuples etc are AND (product types). I like to be able to use both OR and AND at both the expression and type level.

pjmlp 3y ago

Like opam and stackage?

shpongled 3y ago
I'm familiar with both - but not really the same order of magnitude. crates.io lists >120k packages. opam has ~4500, and stackage ~3000. And the package ecosystem is only part of it. Admittedly, I haven't written any OCaml or Haskell in the last year or so, but my experience of just getting a new library or executable up and running isn't comparable to cargo either. But also hard to separate my strong familiarity with Rust from the comparison.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Quality matters more than quantity. I rather have one package that does it right, than 20 doing a different set of 80% from what is needed.
  - shpongled 3y ago
    Who wouldn't. But let's not pretend that stackage and crates.io are covering the same functionality space. As just one example: there are no OCaml or Haskell packages for natively reading or writing parquet files. There are at least 2 such packages for Rust.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Yeah, yet it doesn't matter to me, I don't even know what they are about. Likewise, despite crates.io, Rust is missing lots of stuff I miss from Java, C# and C++. Plenty of stuff isn't there yet.

bheadmaster 3y ago

> If OCaml/StandardML/Haskell/etc had anything close to the ergonomics and convenience of cargo for testing, setting up projects, adding deps, deploying them to any OS/platform, I would probably write about 30-40% less Rust. Ahem... Excuse me, sir, do you have time to talk about our lord and savior Robert Pike?

shpongled 3y ago
> solid type system Politely closes door in your face
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  I personally enjoy working with Go's type system even more than Rust's. For example, implicit interfaces make code reuse much easier than Rust's traits.
  - shpongled 3y ago
    Lack of sum types is complete deal-breaker for me unfortunately.
    - bheadmaster 3y ago
      There's a proposal, for what it's worth: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/57644 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/57644 Although I'm curious, what is your use case that cannot be fulfilled by interfaces, but can with sum types?
      - shpongled 3y ago
        `if err != nil` is the easiest example. Sum types allow you to express type-level OR. Structs/tuples etc are AND (product types). I like to be able to use both OR and AND at both the expression and type level.