Hacker News Reader

Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty simple. Rust's safety features (and other language choices) have a productivity cost. For me I found the cost surprisingly high, and I'm not alone (though I'm sure I'll get replies from people who say the borrow checker never bothers them anymore and made them a better programmer, let's just agree there's room to disagree).

Although I'm a big fan of safety, since experiencing Rust my opinion is that low-pause GC is a better direction for the future of safe but high performance programming. And there's also a niche for languages that aren't absolutely safe which I think Zig looks like a great fit for.

View on HN

Please read the fricking context.

My comment was about preferring other new, low-level languages over Rust when they don’t give the same safety guarantees. If you can deal with a GC then fine—my comment has got nothing to do with that.

So it was much, much more narrow than making a case for Rust in general.

Rust and GC both eliminate certain defects. And if you can use a GC then you don’t need Rust (w.r.t. memory safety).

Admittedly maybe I could have made it more clear that my comment does not make an argument against new low-level capable languages when used with some kind of automatic memory management scheme, like I guess Nim.

After having seeing GC after GC fail to live up to expectations... I'm still voting for Rust. So much more control over wether you even want to allocate or not. I know where you are coming from but, I see it differently I guess.

Whether you allocate or not is a property of the language, not the GC. A lot of GC'd languages encourage or even force allocations all over the place. But maybe we could do better in a new language.

I see a lot of people put rust down for what it is today, and then in the next breathe wistfully wonder about the future of zig, or some other language, etc. It's just not fair.

Rust today let's you avoid allocations, if you want smart pointers you can have them today, I'd you want a GC inside rust, you can have that today as well. Don't need to wait for another language lol.

Enough of Rust is set in stone now that it will never be the language I want. There's nothing fair or unfair about it. That's just the way it is. I still think it is a good language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com