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I don't think Rust was ever intended to be primarily a research language. From what I gathered even from early docs (in Graydon's reign), it was intended to im

by sixbrx 11y ago

I don't think Rust was ever intended to be primarily a research language. From what I gathered even from early docs (in Graydon's reign), it was intended to implement ideas previously introduced in research languages in a practical systems language. They even made mention of adopting only safe ideas* (and I'm too lazy to look for those quotes). I think they've had to innovate some but that wasn't the primary intent.

coolsunglasses 11y ago
That would explain a lot. How do the goals contrast with C++ then? Smaller language?
- kibwen 11y ago
  For reasons of backwards-compatibility, it's basically impossible to design extensions to C++ that make the language memory-safe by default. C++11/14 are admirable best-effort approaches to doing so, but they provide only tools for helping to enforce memory safety without providing any actionable guarantees. Rust guarantees memory safety, with the only possibility of unsafety being relegated to blocks of code specifically denoted as `unsafe`. In addition to memory safety, Rust's other goal was to improve the ability of programmers to reason about low-level concurrency, motivated by the enormous pain that both the Firefox and Chrome developers are currently experiencing by trying to adapt their browsers to a multicore world. The serendipitous discovery was that the same mechanism used to guarantee memory safety will also statically guarantee that your program is free of data races. TL;DR: Rust's goals are guaranteed memory safety, guaranteed freedom from data races, and zero runtime overhead relative to C++.
  - asadotzler 11y ago
    kibwen, this whole reply should be an FAQ somewhere if it isn't already. Nice precision!
nnethercote 11y ago
> I don't think Rust was ever intended to be primarily a research language. Indeed, Graydon chose the name "Rust" specifically because he wanted to avoid cutting-edge language features in favour of old, well-tested ones. (Reasonable people could disagree whether the 1.0 language meets that goal, but it was a goal.)

by sixbrx 11y ago

coolsunglasses 11y ago

That would explain a lot. How do the goals contrast with C++ then? Smaller language?

kibwen 11y ago
For reasons of backwards-compatibility, it's basically impossible to design extensions to C++ that make the language memory-safe by default. C++11/14 are admirable best-effort approaches to doing so, but they provide only tools for helping to enforce memory safety without providing any actionable guarantees. Rust guarantees memory safety, with the only possibility of unsafety being relegated to blocks of code specifically denoted as `unsafe`. In addition to memory safety, Rust's other goal was to improve the ability of programmers to reason about low-level concurrency, motivated by the enormous pain that both the Firefox and Chrome developers are currently experiencing by trying to adapt their browsers to a multicore world. The serendipitous discovery was that the same mechanism used to guarantee memory safety will also statically guarantee that your program is free of data races. TL;DR: Rust's goals are guaranteed memory safety, guaranteed freedom from data races, and zero runtime overhead relative to C++.
- asadotzler 11y ago
  kibwen, this whole reply should be an FAQ somewhere if it isn't already. Nice precision!

nnethercote 11y ago

> I don't think Rust was ever intended to be primarily a research language. Indeed, Graydon chose the name "Rust" specifically because he wanted to avoid cutting-edge language features in favour of old, well-tested ones. (Reasonable people could disagree whether the 1.0 language meets that goal, but it was a goal.)