Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

This is a complicated question, and ends up different for each individual. For me, I don't see the borrow checker as being more silly than GC, just an alternative, and one that speeds up my development process, not slows it down. I am also, of course, incredibly biased.

Rust also has many, many features that are not the borrow checker. Some people prefer Rust because of those features, in spite of the borrow checker.

https://without.boats/blog/notes-on-a-smaller-rust/ is also one of my favorite bits of writing on this topic.

View on HN

That is a great link. The point at the end about making the language embeddable is actually one of the things I love about Rust the most. Rust is aggressively cross platform and I appreciate that a lot. Write a parser in Rust once, run it everywhere.

I’d use Swift a lot more (which has some of the features mentioned in the article) if the resulting code wasn’t limited to Apple OSes (the Linux support is crap). Or perhaps Kotlin if it wasn’t limited to the JVM, etc.

Kotlin isn't limited to the JVM thanks to KotlinJs and Kotlin native

Golang

Wow...there is really really good advice in that post. I was considering making my side project language into a simpler Rust and that post just gave some great suggestions. Especially since I’m writing the compiler in Rust to WASM.

That's a good link there. I think the answer to a smaller Rust is Go, however. The comparative compiler speed alone is worth the price of entry. Don't @ me ;)

Go is so much smaller its no longer anything like a smaller ruts, though.

Or, is Go bigger because the GC represents a ton of complexity?

Smaller Rust is more like OCaml than Go IMO. Go has an entirely different design philosophy.

Go may be smaller than Rust, but I really don't think it is a smaller Rust. There are too many differences in the philosophy, and they make Go just some other language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com