[jerf]

Sadly, due to his untimely passing, I don't think Joe Armstrong ever really got a good chance to analyze Rust's borrow checker from his perspective. So I'd be reluctant to be too dogmatic about what he'd think about it.

Personally I think that if you can stomach the additional complexity (which is a non-trivial "if", but a doable one), Rust's approach supercedes immutability. Full immutability was an interesting theory in the 1990s, and I mean that respectfully and not sarcastically, but in the end I think it was overkill and overcompensation. The correct thing to do is not to eliminate mutability, but to firmly, firmly control it. Rust has a sophisticated method for doing so, with compiler support. It may not be the only one, but it seems a very solid one. Immutability is another method of controlling it, but in my view, it's actually kind of a blunt instrument applied to a complex problem.

In my considered opinion, in the end, immutability isn't even important to Erlang. What matters in Erlang is that you can't send references across messages, so there is no way to witness mutation done by another process. It was not necessary within a given process to be immutable, and I suspect that has been a non-trivial ball and chain around Erlang's legs in terms of adoption even to this day. There was never any need for a newbie Erlang developer to also have to learn how to program immutably within a process.

[toast0]

> Sadly, due to his untimely passing, I don't think Joe Armstrong ever really got a good chance to analyze Rust's borrow checker from his perspective. So I'd be reluctant to be too dogmatic about what he'd think about it.

I agree that Joe was a great explorer of ideas. I'm not sure if he expressed thoughts on Rust, but he would probably look at it again from time to time.

> In my considered opinion, in the end, immutability isn't even important to Erlang. What matters in Erlang is that you can't send references across messages, so there is no way to witness mutation done by another process.

In some ways, you may be right. But you can always mutate the process dictionary if immutable data really bothers you. But even with the process dictionary, it's not possible to construct a self refering datastructure as an Erlang term, which is important! That makes garbage collection simple.

Also, functional programming makes Erlang processes effectively preemptive, when they're built from cooperative user space threads. Tokio tasks can loop and tie up the OS thread it's running on; but an Erlang process will always come to a function call in finite time and can be descheduled at that time, so all runable processes will get a share of cpu.

Edit to add: It's also important to note that Immutability is a property of Erlang (and Elixir), not a property of BEAM. The BEAM vm has opcodes for mutation, and the Erlang compiler will emit them in certain sequences --- if you never use the old value again, it's ok to mutate it rather that create a new modified value; you're most likely to see that with Tuples, IIRC.