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Comment by makapuf | Hacker News Reader

I quite like C syntax, and I sometimes long for a language that would change a few elements (default to const and static, different/safer standard api for strings). Some might call it Go but a simple slightly updated C would be nice.

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Have you seen zig? It's a modern language that tries to keep the simplicity and explicitness of C (it does change the syntax a bit though).

I really wish Zig had followed Rust’s lead and made variables const by default :/

Variables are immutable by default in Rust, but they're not const by default. The difference is that a variable can become mutable while a const is always immutable.

How do you set a variable as mutable after the fact in rust?

You can do:

    let foo = "1234".to_string();
    let mut foo = foo;
    foo = "5678";

This only works if you have ownership of the variable though. And in practice it's a pretty good compromise, because it's pretty hard to do this by mistake.

Note: const in rust is different to const in some other languages: it represents a value that is duplicated inline into each use site at compile time.

Yes I think i see it more like constexpr.

That is pretty much D (assuming you only want to use the C-like bits) - it's not const by default but const is much easier to use and much more violent

And arrays are bounds checked by default, no more issues with them (and strings are arrays)

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