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There were languages with lifetimes and borrowing mechanics before Rust. Rust packages these mechanics in a nice way. Just like Zig encodes many niceties in a u
by hu3 11mo ago
There were languages with lifetimes and borrowing mechanics before Rust. Rust packages these mechanics in a nice way. Just like Zig encodes many niceties in a useful C language (comptime, simple cross-compilation, stdlib).
- brabel 11mo agoWhich ones?? Before Rust, to my knowledge, no language had an actually practical way to use lifetimes and borrow-checking so that both memory safety and concurrency safety (data races, which is huge) were solved, even though the concepts were known in research. Doing the actual work to make it practical is what makes the difference between some obscure research topic and a widely used language that actually solves serious problems in the real world.
- pjmlp 11mo agoCyclone for one, which AT&T created exactly to replace C.
- brabel 11mo agoYeah but is that a practical language people can use instead of C and Rust? I’ve always heard of it only as a research language that inspired rust but nothing else.
- pjmlp 11mo agoOutside AT&T until they ramped down the project, I guess not, Rust also took its time to actually take off beyond Mozilla, and is around because it was rescued by big tech (Amazon, Google, Microsoft,...) hiring most of the core team after Mozilla's layoffs.