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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a fairly decent syntax. It’s less simple than many systems languages because it has a very strong type system. That’s a choice of preference in how you want to solve a problem.

I don’t think the memory safety guarantees of Rust could be expressed in the syntax of a language like C or Go.

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I code mostly in Go and the typing sloppiness is a major pain point.

Example: You read the expression "x.f", say, in the output of git-diff. Is x a struct object, or a pointer to a struct? Only by referring to enclosing context can you know for sure.

> It’s less simple than many systems languages because it has a very strong type system.

I don’t think that’s the case, somehow most ML derived languages ended up with stronger type system and cleaner syntax.

Rust's most complained about syntax, the lifetime syntax, was borrowed from an ML: OCaml.

One of the design goals of rust is explicitness. I think if Rust had type elision, like many other functional languages, it would go a long way to cleaning up the syntax.

Is ML a systems language? Sorry, maybe my definition is wrong, but I consider a systems language something that’s used by a decent amount of OS’es, programming languages and OS utilities.

I assume you’re talking about OCaml et al? I’m intruiged by it, but I’m coming from a Haskell/C++ background.

Rust is somewhat unique in terms of system language this because it’s the first one that’s not “simple” like C but still used for systems tools, more than Go is as far as I’m aware.

Which probably has to do with its performance characteristics being close to the machine, which Go cannot do (ie based on LLVM, no GC, etc)

There is no other ML-like that is as low level. Except perhaps ATS, which has terrible syntax.

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