Rust is becoming less special in this area. Languages such as Dlang, Vlang, and Julia have added optional ownership and borrowing. As these offerings are optional, many can see this as greater programmer freedom to decide what to use for their projects, with languages that are easier to use or read.
embedding-shape 20 minutes ago||
> Rust is becoming less special in this area. Languages such as Dlang, Vlang, and Julia have added optional ownership and borrowing
Isn't the crux that Rust does those things without a garbage collector, that's the novel part? Someone correct me if I'm wrong (likely), but I think all those languages have garbage collectors, which Rust doesn't.
bcjdjsndon 21 minutes ago||
I guarantee they'll be complaining about unsafe rust in 10-15 years, mark my words. Just like they said exceptions "force" a programmer to deal with all error cases (newsflash, they still ignore it), rust will not eliminate memory errors.
ellie_kim98 2 days ago||
[dead]
jonathanstrange 2 hours ago|
[flagged]
conradludgate 1 hour ago||
I miss the clear distinction between exclusive access and shared access when I work in GC languages. Knowing clearly when you are allowed/expected to modify a value, and when you are expected to only read the value ends up being very useful and it has poisoned my brain when working in Python/JS/Go where some values are internally pointers and there's no standard to learn once for when a mutation is safe or if you should always make a copy
quietbritishjim 48 minutes ago||
One way to deal with this in GC languages is to have a separate read-only view on a mutable object. The example that comes to mind, though it's a bit more complex than a view on a simple data structure is CancellationToken (read only) vs CancellationTokenSource (writable in the sense of having "cancel()" method) in C#. I'm not saying it's better than proper mutability support but it does work well enough sometimes.
zigzag312 1 hour ago||
Reference counting is a form of garbage collection.