Hacker News Reader

I’m glad that domain-limited integer types are called out: I wish more languages had that.

At the same time: there’s a reasonable practical argument that both have essentially safe semantics, and that “safer” one is really just the more successful (easier to integrate into existing codebases, more online resources, &c.) one. Rust is (thus far) winning at that.

View on HN

That feature really helps when you use integers for indexing, e.g., like an enum. Say you are parsing a file format with a type field which can have values 5, 6, 7, you can easily check if that's valid with a single call and lookup something, like a corresponding length in an array without having to translate those field values to array indices first.

Yep, although Rust manages to get there just fine with sum types and fallible conversion traits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com