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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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pjmlp·

> Modula-3, Eiffel, Sather

Nice to see these languages on Rust's team radar, specially Sather.

Just shows how you guys have researched prior work, congratulations.

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It is funny he doesn't mention OCaml (because of his work with it). Yes OCaml has a GC but from what I recall it has a rather low overhead GC (in terms of latency. I need to find source but I remember it being impressive compared to others). I believe there was some attempts to incorporate some real time libraries but it was a long time ago.

Depending on what you define as system programming OCaml also has the whole bare metal Mirage OS [1] thing as well.

And of course OCaml is a pretty darn safe language (albeit its threading/concurrency libraries are fragmented so the safety is more type safety than concurrency).

[1]: https://mirage.io/

Yeah, Caml Light (OCaml's predecessor) was my introduction to ML family of languages.

All the languages on my snippet also have GC, but are less known than OCaml, maybe hence why he omitted it.

To be clear, Graydon doesn't work on Rust anymore, and hasn't in years. His knowledge of the space is absolutely impressive, though. :)

Only inaccuracy I find is in his claim on safe concurrency in other languages. It existed in Concurrent Pascal (used in Solo OS), Ravenscar Ada (widely deployed), and Eiffel SCOOP (widely deployed). Rust isn't the first doing this. It's just apparently the best at it in system space. Ada camp is making a comeback, though, with ParaSail that looks interesting:

http://www.embedded.com/design/other/4375616/ParaSail--Less-...

ParaSail development looks stalled since its main designer joined AdaCore.

Just my impression, anyone feel free to correct me.

Yes, I've not seen a Napier reference in years. Really impressed to have seen that.

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