[hardwaregeek]

Yeah Rust is popular because it's a practical language with a nice type system, decent escape hatches, and good tooling. The borrow checker attracts some, but it could have easily been done in a way with terrible usability.

[darby_eight]

> The borrow checker attracts some, but it could have easily been done in a way with terrible usability.

Why would anyone use the resulting language over C? What you're describing is C with a slightly friendlier compiler.

[Ar-Curunir]

I have never heard C as being described to have a good type system.

[jjgreen]

To this day, many C programmers believe that strong typing just means pounding extra hard on the keyboard.

Peter van der Linden, "Expert C Programming"

[tialaramex]

"Strongly typed, weakly checked". Which is a funny way to say "Not strongly typed" or perhaps more generously "The compilers aren't very good and neither are the programmers but other than that..." (and yes I write that as a long time C programmer)

But hey, C does have types:

First it has several different integers with silly names like "long" and "short".

Then it has the integers again but wearing a Groucho mask and with twice as many zeroes, "float" and "double".

Then an integer that's probably one byte, unless it isn't, in which case it is anyway, and which doesn't know whether it's signed or not, "char".

Then a very small integer that takes up too much space ("_Bool" aka bool)

Finally though, it does have types which definitely aren't integers, unfortunately they participates in integer arithmetic anyway and many C programmers believe they're integers, but the compiler doesn't so that's... well it's a disaster, I speak of course of the pointers.

[darby_eight]

You could try to argue this is the only source of rust's popularity.... or you could admit that the borrow checker is in fact a reason why folks use Rust over C.