Hacker News Reader

Why not both? I want both GC for recursive data structures (lists, trees, graphs, etc.) and Rust-style resource management when deterministic reclamation matters (files, GUI objects, etc.).

View on HN

This is something that is in discussion, though I don't know the status of any of the discussions:

https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/on-native-allocations-poin...

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/bdbe73d1be948dd925c6b...

I should've been clearer: For low-level programming, Rust is already fine as it is. What I want is a high-level language that offers some of the benefits of Rust (safe deterministic non-memory resource management), without the unnecessarily low-level features (sized types and overemphasis on unique ownership). Due to its C++ heritage, Rust has a tendency to conflate ownership (a high-level concern) with indirection (a low-level one), which is fine for the niche it targets, but too inflexible for general-purpose programming, IMO.

OCaml or Haskell.

Neither OCaml nor Haskell has substructural types. There's no way to tell their type systems “you can't use a file after it's been closed”. In fact, what I want can be summarized as “ML plus substructural types”! (But preferably with Standard ML as the base point, since OCaml has way too many warts for my taste.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com