Mainly because GC is easier on inexperienced (and, really, all) programmers than linear types.
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!