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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

Rust could conceivably have worked similar to C, where you have to cast void* to the correct type. You could still have borrowing annotations on such generic pointers, similar to how C(++) has const. Having borrowing semantics doesn’t necessarily imply a general-purpose generics feature. Stuff like iterators and option types would obviously be different then.

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You could build a completely different language with some of Rust's features, if you go back a few years before Rust 1.0 there are lots of possibilities, but what I was getting at is that Rust itself is much more tightly wedded to the generics than many of the languages people associate with generics, a "Rust without generics" isn't Rust at all.

Even in C++ the generics are a later addition, Stroustrup's early 1980s language doesn't have generic types, templates were a proposal added to what would become the C++ 98 standard and the Standard Template Library presents generic types for containers in C++ years after the C++ language was first popularized.

I don’t think we really disagree. I was originally reaponding to the claim by DANK_YACHT stating that a (statically typed) language can be successful without having generics as long as it has other sufficiently innovative features. As a “counterexample” I hypothesized a version of Rust without generics but with the borrow checker (arguably the innovative feature most decisive for Rust’s success) and argued that I would doubt that this version would have been very successful, exactly because its lack of generics (which I believe aligns with what you are arguing). I’m not sure if you’re arguing that this hypothetical scenario isn’t a valid counterargument to the original claim I was responding to.

Yes, technically you can do that but it makes no sense from a design point of view to have a language that cares so much about safety it adds a borrowing system but then says "fuck it" to type safety.

You have to have type safety to have memory safety and that was the whole point of Rust.

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