[erik_seaberg]

At the time Emacs was created, Lisp was one of the few languages that had automatic memory management and higher-order functions and error handling, but those have been lifted so often that they're now table stakes for modern languages.

I'm pushing 50 and excited about Rust because it's finally conceivable to have software that works reliably. I like Emacs, but it's not like I haven't seen my share of crashes in its kinda clunky C runtime. Hell, Rust even has macros.

[Torwald]

> it's finally conceivable to have software that works reliably.

Care to elaborate what you mean by that?

[erik_seaberg]

The industry has been trying to write C and then C++ for decades, but it all blows up randomly. Buffer overruns, use after free, shared mutable state. Apparently tooling exists that tries to make Rust-like guarantees, but it's so costly I've literally never seen it used.

[Torwald]

I don't get it. What about the JVM or ObjC or C#? How is it that only with Rust the things you stated are coming to us?

[erik_seaberg]

Much as Elisp is written in C, the JVM and CLR are each written in C++ and assembly, hosted on an OS written in C and assembly, and I've seen all of these crash.

[Torwald]

Thanks, I know see better what you mean. But, wasn't that achieved prior to Rust by realtime OSs like QNX?

[erik_seaberg]

I don't know much about QNX, but I haven't heard anything about seL4-type rigor going into it, so I wouldn't bet on it working a lot better than Linux or Windows.