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Personally while I'm somewhat pragmatic about Rust, I do have to admit it fills a niche that no other language does currently: that of a high-performance, zero

Personally while I'm somewhat pragmatic about Rust, I do have to admit it fills a niche that no other language does currently: that of a high-performance, zero runtime memory-safe language. By memory-safety I mean the basic 'no crashes and corruption' version, that's fulfilled by Java, Go etc., but not by C++ and Zig. I'm a C++ dev among other things, and I have enough experience to know, you really can't hand C++ to a novice dev (even one who uses smart pointers correctly), and expect an app with no memory related crashes/issues. For this reason only, I generally thing C/C++/Zig is a language for typical professional projects/applications (which are written usually in GC languages nowadays). I think it's a hard cutoff criteria. Most programmers/orgs simply cannot work with memory unsafe software. Most commerical C++ codebases leak. This is basically the most important and common 'niche' of SW dev, which for some reason has been somewhat neglected, and I don't really consider Rust a great fit here either, but it doesn't lack anything that would disqualify it. Swift would be another good choice, but it seems that language is very tied to the Apple ecosystem. The only (non-Apple) language that understood EXACTLY what these people wanted imo was Object Pascal/Delphi in the 90s to early 2000s but seem to have died out unfortunately.

andsoitis 6d ago
> Personally while I'm somewhat pragmatic about Rust, I do have to admit it fills a niche that no other language does currently: that of a high-performance, zero runtime memory-safe language. Ada/SPARK comes close: memory safety is very strong, formally provable. Has no GC. Excellent performance. Very mature.
- tgv 6d ago
  SPARK is quite hard, harder than Rust, I would say (based on limited experience, though), and Ada isn't that memory safe, IIRC. They are, however, much more readable than Rust.
- zumtrotz 5d ago
  Ada does not get enough love.
MBCook 6d ago
Swift is not heavily tied to the Apple ecosystem anymore, and it’s getting better every year. However that perception tends to mean it’s only heavily used there.
- bigyabai 5d ago
  Foundation and SwiftUI definitely are, which makes porting Swift applications very difficult.
hn_submit 5d ago
Swift is basically C++ with shared_ptr (i.e. using reference counting for smart pointers). You need to be aware of its limitations just as you would with shared_ptr.

andsoitis 6d ago

> Personally while I'm somewhat pragmatic about Rust, I do have to admit it fills a niche that no other language does currently: that of a high-performance, zero runtime memory-safe language. Ada/SPARK comes close: memory safety is very strong, formally provable. Has no GC. Excellent performance. Very mature.

tgv 6d ago
SPARK is quite hard, harder than Rust, I would say (based on limited experience, though), and Ada isn't that memory safe, IIRC. They are, however, much more readable than Rust.
zumtrotz 5d ago
Ada does not get enough love.

MBCook 6d ago

Swift is not heavily tied to the Apple ecosystem anymore, and it’s getting better every year. However that perception tends to mean it’s only heavily used there.

bigyabai 5d ago
Foundation and SwiftUI definitely are, which makes porting Swift applications very difficult.

hn_submit 5d ago

Swift is basically C++ with shared_ptr (i.e. using reference counting for smart pointers). You need to be aware of its limitations just as you would with shared_ptr.