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> I wish Rust had been around 30 years ago when I loved doing low level programming.

I think Rust’s killer feature is lifetime analysis by the compiler. In 1991, you had 33 MHz 80486 with around 4 MB of RAM. I don’t think the average developer had the computing power to do Rust’s lifetime in any reasonable amount of time.

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Lifetime analysis doesn’t even show up in Rust compiler profiles. It takes 0 seconds.

Rust lifetime analysis is a function-local pass. It never needs to access any state outside the function. It can be done on all functions in parallel, etc.

You could do Rust alias analysis with 33 MHZ.

Indeed, but they could have used a Pascal dialect, Basic compiler dialect, or Modula-2 to save many of the security headaches of C.

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