3 ms·

I think that, having used both of them, Rust is going to feel a lot lower level than OCaml. The single biggest thing is that it's pretty hard (slash near imposs

I think that, having used both of them, Rust is going to feel a lot lower level than OCaml. The single biggest thing is that it's pretty hard (slash near impossible) to write Rust code without thinking about memory allocation, which adds non-trivial mental overhead to the work. That isn't to put down Rust - I think they are the first language that actually has a static, type-checkable story about memory allocation, and that's phenomenal, _but_, the reason for this is to be able to write soft-realtime code (for example, browser engines, games, etc). Web code, at least in the early stages, probably usually has lower performance requirements, and most people would probably trade some performance (and I don't mean to say that OCaml is slow, anymore than Go is slow, etc) for not having to even think about that stuff.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
eridius 12y ago
Eh, I don't see that as a downside. And actually, I'm not sure that's even true. It's already apparent that a lot of people are using a lot of completely unnecessary allocation in Rust, precisely because they aren't thinking about what they're doing (and so are doing things like using heap-allocated String objects when they really just need &str slices, or using Box unnecessarily; this was one of the reason cited for moving away from the ~ sigil, as it was considered to "hide" allocation too much). And speaking personally, I almost never have to consciously think about allocation, unless I'm doing really performance-sensitive work. The straightforward approach is usually correct.