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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

> Sure, Rust also supports reference counting GC, but that is more _verbose_ to use... It should be _simpler_ to use in my view, similar to Python.

If that's what you're looking for, you can use Swift. The latest release has memory safety by default, just like Rust.

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Someone, maybe Tolnay?, recently posted a short Go snippet that segfaults because the virtual function table pointer and data pointer aren't copied atomically or mutexed. The same thing works in swift, because neither is thread safe. Swift is also slower than go unless you pass unchecked making it even less safe than go. C#/f# are safer from that particular problem and more performant than either go or swift, but have suffered from the same deserialization attacks that java does. Right now if you want true memory and thread safety, you need to limit a GC language to zero concurrency, use a borrow checker, i.e. rust, or be purely functional which in production would mean haskell. None of those are effortless, and which is easiest depends on you and your problem. Rust is easiest for me, but I keep thinking if I justvwrite enough haskell it will all click. I'm worried if my brain starts working that way about the impacts on things other than writing Haskell.

Replying to myself because a vouch wasn't enough to bring the post back from the dead. They were partially right and educated me. The downvotes were unnecessary. MS did start advising against dangerous deserializers 8yrs ago. They were only deprecated three years ago though, and only removed last year. Some of the remaining are only mostly safe and then only if you follow best practice. So it isn't a problem entirely of the past, but it has gotten a lot better.

Unless you are writing formal proofs nothing is completely safe, GC languages had found a sweet spot until increased concurrency started uncovering thread safety problems. Rust seems to have found a sweet spot that is usable despite the grumbling. It could probably be made a bit easier. The compiler already knows when something needs to be send or synch, and it could just do that invisibly, but that would lead people to code in a way that had lots of locking which is slow and generates deadlocks too often. This way the wordiness of shared mutable state steers you towards avoiding it except when a functional design pattern wouldn't be performant. If you have to use mutex a lot in rust stop fighting the borrow checker and listen to what it is saying.

> C#/f# are safer from that particular problem and more performant than either go or swift, but have suffered from the same deserialization attacks that java does.

They have not in the past 10 years.

Yes. I do like Swift as a language. The main disadvantages of Swift, in my view, are: (A) The lack of an (optional) "ownership" model for memory management. So you _have_ to use reference counting everywhere. That limits the performance. This is measurable: I converted some micro-benchmarks to various languages, and Swift does suffer for the memory managment intensive tasks [1]. (B) Swift is too Apple-centric currently. Sure, this might be become a non-issue over time.

[1] https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang/blob/main/doc/perf...

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