Comment by albrewer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by albrewer | Hacker News Reader

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For one reason or another, those other languages didn't take off and Rust did.

Language adoption isn't just about technical merits (although those have to be there). The ecosystem, tooling, core team, learning resources, and overall community have to be there, too.

To your point - if I want to get started in another language that is 1) statically compiled, 2) non-garbage collected, and 3) memory-safe by design, as far as I can tell my only other mainstream options are Swift / Objective-C, Ada / SPARK, and Nim. I don't see nearly as much activity in those language's open source ecosystems, and "basic" libraries might not even exist due to the small communities.

Nim is garbage-collected, actually. It has an option to disable garbage-collection (though I thought there was talk of removing that at some point) but then it just leaks memory, it doesn't have a comprehensive system for GC-less memory management like Rust does.

Friend nim does have gc less memory management https://nim-lang.org/blog/2020/10/15/introduction-to-arc-orc... and can also collect cycles similar to PHP. Imo the new system is more intuitive than rust's which will be a huge win when it comes out (soon).

Nim is also not the only language with the combination of optional GC and memory management. Dlang and Vlang are two others, where the GC is optional and are compiled languages. Golang appears to be more seriously experimenting with various forms of manual memory management, so at some point, we might see it offer a choice of memory management options too. In fact, Dlang even has an experimental borrow checker.

Care should be taken to not be in so much of a bubble, to not realize that other languages have viable solutions too or are developing alternatives to what's presently available. If our choice for one or the other, is more a matter of personal preference, it would arguably be better to acknowledge such.

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