Why shouldn't the unexperienced systems programmers go "all in" by using Rust, then? The first priority for them should be memory safety. Not to mention that Rust has more ergonomic features and stronger ecosystems.
And, maybe rust is a poor choice because the language encourages layering hidden complexity and architecture astronauting.
You can't have a system programming language without some unsafe layer because eventually you will have to interface with either the OS or a library written in another language and that's unsafe. Even languages like Java and C# have unsafe escape hatches for situations like these.
Because it's easy for beginners (and even experts) to create a memory safety bug, which is more critical than most bugs.
> If the first priority is always memory safety, then rust should not have `unsafe` keyword.
Err.. I suppose you don't fully understand how memory safety in Rust can be achieved. Every safe abstraction (function, trait, etc.) depends on unsafe code, either directly or transitively.
What's the difference between a safe function and an unsafe one, then? A safe function won't violate memory safety, no matter what combination of arguments passed to it.
Also, memory safety vulnerabilities is the largest class of vulnerability by count today by a large margin (70% of the total) and cost a lot of money to bigger companies.
As changing language stacks also cost a lot of money, there needs to be a strong incentive to do so. Getting memory safety without compromising applicability to the lowest levels of the stack is one such incentive.
Rust also doesn't have a lot of drawbacks, from my experience (professional use for years, coming from C++) and from recent reports from Google[1] (in particular, the learning curve steepness[2] and productivity penalty[3] are overstated).
[1]: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2023/06/rust-fact-vs-ficti...
[2]: Anecdotally, these ramp-up numbers are in line with the time we’ve seen for developers to adopt other languages, both inside and outside of Google. (Same report)
[3]: Overall, we’ve seen no data to indicate that there is any productivity penalty for Rust relative to any other language these developers previously used at Google. (Same report)
Here's a reference to the contrary[1]:
> Overall, we’ve seen no data to indicate that there is any productivity penalty for Rust relative to any other language these developers previously used at Google.
[1]: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2023/06/rust-fact-vs-ficti...
It’s quite obviously true, that you have to actively think/maintain how long each instance lives, which is simply done by the runtime in your place in case of a managed language.
In my experience, this is not a big effort at writing new code, but at refactoring/maintenance - as lifetimes are parts of the public APIs even.
While this is true for most of the article, I think the quoted sentence is about more general Rust use.
> In my experience, this is not a big effort at writing new code, but at refactoring/maintenance
In my experience working on the Meilisearch codebase, Rust is the easiest language to refactor, because it catches so many errors at compile time:
1. Most languages lack the `mut` binding modifier that allows to warn when the binding does not need to be mutable (catching errors when part of the code hasn't been updated)
2. Most languages lack exhaustive initialization, destructuring and matching, that catch pretty much all the situations where a new field has been added to a struct.
3. Let's not speak about languages with null, or without static typing
Having more type information (including lifetimes) makes refactorings easier, not harder. I concede it causes a bit more boilerplate but that's not the bottleneck when writing code.
GC is undeniably easier to work with, at least at first, and the comment I was responding to was about "inexperienced programmers". No bleeping citation needed because it's my opinion see. I'm not saying that GC is better than linear types (it's not), but apparently the very thought that GC might be easier on "inexperienced programmers" is enough to send HN commenters into a tizzy!