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Comment by tosihakkeri | Hacker News Reader

This is written in Rust

No, that’s not mentioned as an advantage on the website.

I assume the parent comment did not make fun of nushell advertizing this, but instead about the rust community advertizing itself all the time.

To be honest, they have good reason. Being written in a strongly typed, memory-safe language is a huge advantage. Obviously it's not the primary thing to look out for, but I do prefer tools that are written in it.

There are plenty of strongly typed memory safe languages. In fact I think those are the majority of popular languages.

Of course the person you're replying to is talking about languages without a garbage collector. Systems languages with zero cost abstractions.

But why? There is nothing about a shell that requires zero cost abstractions or no gc. It farms all of its work out to other executables. A shell could be written in literally any language.

I'm not really sure which other popular languages would be considered memory safe AND strongly typed. I know of both C and C++ which I wouldn't consider memory safe. And I know of Javascript, which is not strongly typed... so which do you mean?

Java, Scala, Kotlin, C#, D, Go, and TypeScript to name a few.

Even Python fits the bill.

Of those only D and Go build self contained binaries (yes i know about Graal/Kotlin Native/.Net AOT). No snark intended.

This is moving the goal post a bit, since the person I replied to was considering JavaScript, but I don’t really think this distinction matters. You get most programs from a package manager.

I am curious though why you don’t count graal or .net aot? They are valid options to produce an aot binary and C# has been able to produce a self contained non-aot runtime for a long a time.

Yet, almost all the basic tools in a Unix system are written in C.

> Being written in a strongly typed, memory-safe language is a huge advantage.

Great point, C# is a strongly typed and memory-safe language if you don't use unsafe. So this really is a huge advantage for PowerShell.

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