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> The fact they've managed to bring safety to the masses without a GC is arguably the #1 reason for Rust's success. This has been a good move. That's an unders

> The fact they've managed to bring safety to the masses without a GC is arguably the #1 reason for Rust's success. This has been a good move. That's an understatement. Rust doesn't require a framework / runtime. Unlike NodeJS, Python, Java, C#, ect; when you ship a Rust program, it has no external requirements. More important: Because Rust can create libraries that adhere to the C calling convention, you can create libraries that you can call from NodeJS, Python, Java, C#, ect. The fact that those systems have a heavyweight runtime (with GC) makes it very hard to create a library in one environment and call it from the other. I do think there's room for an "R2" that is semantically identical, but designed to be easier to understand. Probably the biggest room for improvement is using generics for things like RC, ARC, Mutex. I'd rather use something like keywords; and leave generics for user-defined types. This way, when trying to understand what something "is," the "how the memory is tracked" is semantically different from "what the struct is." (Even though under the hood they are the same thing.)

thinkharderdev 3y ago
> using generics for things like RC, ARC There is an unstable feature for "box syntax" which both allows you to construct a `Box<T>` as let foo = box a (instead of let foo = Box::new(a)) but also to use box as a keyword in pattern matches to deref the box automatically. So struct Foo { value: Box<Bar> }; let Foo { value: box Bar } (in which case value is bound to a &Bar) which was really nice. It got subsumed into a more generic "deref patterns" project which doesn't seem to be going anywhere but I hope it does because it makes the language much more ergonomic IMO.
- SkiFire13 3y ago
  The `box` syntax to create `Box`es has been removed because it was broken. The initial idea was to have it initialize the value directly in the heap, but that never worked for function calls. The `box` pattern instead remained as it was still useful to have (really unfortunate for the perma-unstable status though).
  - thinkharderdev 3y ago
    Ah didn't realized it had been removed. I gave up on it after it became clear it was never going to make it into stable rust. I do hope deref patterns gets some traction though as it could really be a nice feature.

thinkharderdev 3y ago

> using generics for things like RC, ARC There is an unstable feature for "box syntax" which both allows you to construct a `Box<T>` as let foo = box a (instead of let foo = Box::new(a)) but also to use box as a keyword in pattern matches to deref the box automatically. So struct Foo { value: Box<Bar> }; let Foo { value: box Bar } (in which case value is bound to a &Bar) which was really nice. It got subsumed into a more generic "deref patterns" project which doesn't seem to be going anywhere but I hope it does because it makes the language much more ergonomic IMO.

SkiFire13 3y ago
The `box` syntax to create `Box`es has been removed because it was broken. The initial idea was to have it initialize the value directly in the heap, but that never worked for function calls. The `box` pattern instead remained as it was still useful to have (really unfortunate for the perma-unstable status though).
- thinkharderdev 3y ago
  Ah didn't realized it had been removed. I gave up on it after it became clear it was never going to make it into stable rust. I do hope deref patterns gets some traction though as it could really be a nice feature.