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Comment by revskill | Hacker News Reader

One question though: What does Garbage collection do besides what Rust provide? Ownership and borrow checker.

Garbage collection deals with a couple (albeit rare) additional cases (e.g reference cycles) while requiring significantly less mental overhead.

Frees cognitive resources because you can usually forget that menory management is a thing. When on GC.

I usually don't think about memory management in Rust, to be fair.

Also GC doesn't remove all resource management... ironically I find most GC-based languages to be more mentally taxing when managing manual resources (file handles, mutex locks, etc).

Haskell programmers says that Haskell is just fine as well, but in the end there aren't many big programs with complex architecture in these languages. Compilers, interpreters, crud servers etc, those things are very simple architecturally so for them these languages are fine, but for more complex cases these pure languages seems to be too cumbersome.

What i love about Haskell, is it made things simple, not simpler.

If you have a program with complex architecture, you're doing wrong somehow.

If you can't decomposing the complexity, you will have complexity. I think it's not about programming language, it's about human (and technology).

When you try to adapt your program to fit the needs of humans and technology it will become complex no matter what you do. The world is full of problems that can't be decomposed nicely because they are created by millions of people over decades each doing things slightly differently and you need to make a program that fills their needs, if you think those kind of problems don't exist you are just naïve. Those are the programs with the most complex architecture.

That also means that "soup of pointers" datastructures have a more fertile ground to sprout because there's no pushback to them, except by the developers themselves. I find that the memory patterns that the borrow checker dislikes are also the ones that tend to confuse humans.

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