Comment by jwecker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwecker | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the thoughtful response- it didn't come across as combative at all to me.

The true, provable safety of Rust was what drew me to it as well. I've always hated having to choose between un-principled memory management (with it's security and functionality vulnerabilities that can lie dormant for many years before kicking your butt) and garbage-collection forcing you away from the metal and removing deterministic reasoning about memory usage, runtime behavior, and runtime overhead.

I've been going through the academic papers, forerunners, and source-code for Rust's static memory routines and borrowing semantics. My hope and suspicion is that it can be added to Nim without core changes to the language like lifetimes. It's definitely not a guarantee, but with lots of experience in both languages now I feel very strongly that adding region-based-memory-management to Nim is possible while adding Nim's clarity, abstractions, and efficiency to Rust feels impossible.

I agree that at the moment Rust is the only responsible choice right now if provable memory safety is a primary concern, but I suspect that will change. In the mean-time, for us anyway, the price was too high in productivity when we discovered that we could do manual memory management in Nim in very well-considered isolated places and confidently use Nim's fast, real-time deterministic per-thread garbage-collection for everything else without a noticeable performance penalty.

Having said that, I don't think I actually disagree with anything you said (:

> I've been going through the academic papers, forerunners, and source-code for Rust's static memory routines and borrowing semantics. My hope and suspicion is that it can be added to Nim without core changes to the language like lifetimes. It's definitely not a guarantee, but with lots of experience in both languages now I feel very strongly that adding region-based-memory-management to Nim is possible while adding Nim's clarity, abstractions, and efficiency to Rust feels impossible.

I'm not so sure. The trickiest part of getting memory safety without garbage collection working is not the lifetimes but the borrow check, which relies on inherited mutability and, most importantly, the lack of aliasable mutable data. The APIs and libraries of garbage collected imperative languages invariably depend on aliasable, mutable memory. Consider something as simple as a tree or graph data structure with mutable nodes. Or consider taking two mutable references to different indices of an array, or splitting an array into mutable slices with dynamically computed indices. These are all things you (presumably) can do today in Nim, and a borrow checker would break them. The likelihood that the library APIs depend on being able to do it is very high.

I never say never: you could implement multiple types of references, some GC'd and some not, and copy the Rust borrowing semantics. But they would be incompatible with most existing APIs and libraries. I don't think it can be realistically retrofitted onto a language without breaking most APIs: aliasable, mutable data is just too common.

Regarding efficiency/performance, what in particular seems impossible to add to Rust?

Thanks for your reply! An enjoyable exchange in the midst of what often feels like a bit of a very tiring flame war.

I am constantly on the lookout for languages that could be suitable for replacing (or greatly diminishing) the use of C/C++ in my work, and so far Rust is one of the front runners.

However, I am also very much aware of some of the troubles I would most likely face in convincing my colleagues, like language complexity and productivity, and I completely respect the decision that it may not be worth it, depending on a wide variety of factors.

I try to keep an open mind, and I look forward to reading more about the improvements to Nim you envision! Thanks again (and good night). :)

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