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by tosihakkeri 1200 days ago
This is written in Rust

/s

1 comments

No, that’s not mentioned as an advantage on the website.
I assume the parent comment did not make fun of nushell advertizing this, but instead about the rust community advertizing itself all the time.
To be honest, they have good reason. Being written in a strongly typed, memory-safe language is a huge advantage. Obviously it's not the primary thing to look out for, but I do prefer tools that are written in it.
There are plenty of strongly typed memory safe languages. In fact I think those are the majority of popular languages.
Yet, almost all the basic tools in a Unix system are written in C.
Of course the person you're replying to is talking about languages without a garbage collector. Systems languages with zero cost abstractions.
But why? There is nothing about a shell that requires zero cost abstractions or no gc. It farms all of its work out to other executables. A shell could be written in literally any language.
I'm not really sure which other popular languages would be considered memory safe AND strongly typed. I know of both C and C++ which I wouldn't consider memory safe. And I know of Javascript, which is not strongly typed... so which do you mean?
Java, Scala, Kotlin, C#, D, Go, and TypeScript to name a few.
> Being written in a strongly typed, memory-safe language is a huge advantage.

Great point, C# is a strongly typed and memory-safe language if you don't use unsafe. So this really is a huge advantage for PowerShell.