| I was about to say a similar thing. Yes, in a CS-sense anything you can do in one Turing-complete language you can do in any other Turing-complete lang. They almost certainly were not disputing that. If you factor in the real world, the number shrinks as you get to things like performance, cross-platform support, ease of packaging and distribution. But still, Nu could plausibly have been written in Assembly, C, C++, D, Go, Nim, Zig, Haskell and so on. You would have lost some of Rust's strengths and weaknesses and imported another set (regarding the language, tooling, performance, ease of debugging and so on). I took the comment to mean that as far as they (all people intimately familiar with the language, tooling and ecosystem) are concerned, this would be a trade-off that would be negative enough to not begin or finish the project in the first place. I don't know what plans and requirements the Nu authors had. But for my own game (a roguelike written in Rust) the requirements on the performance, distribution, stability, ease of development and dependency management meant that Rust was (at the time) pretty much the only viable choice for me. Could someone have written it in C? Sure. Could I have written it in C? Likely, yes. Would I have ever finish the game in C? Almost certainly no. For various reasons none of the other languages would have done in those circumstances, not really. Human language is an imperfect method for transferring information and sometimes one trades off brevity for nuance. |