[ninkendo]

The concept of a string’s primary storage being separate from a view/pointer to its contents, is a necessary distinction to draw if you want to minimize copies and still not require garbage collection. Any language that gives you control over your memory is going to need this distinction. Thinking of ownership is a necessary cognitive burden if you want to avoid unnecessary allocations or garbage collection pauses.

People coming from JS or Python look at these burdens and think “rust sucks because I have to worry about string allocation”, without caring that all languages have to deal with this somehow, and if they’re not making the programmer think of it, the language will have to manage itself in a way that won’t always be optimal.

The analogy I like to make is that if a JS developer thinks it’s bad for a language to make them deal with some abstraction, the should consider that their JavaScript VM itself needs to be written in a language that makes someone care about this stuff. JS only works at all because some engineer writing C++ is thinking deeply about string lifetimes. It can’t just be JavaScript all the way down.

However if you’re using Rust in an environment that could just as easily use a GC’d language, you could definitely make the case that it’s the wrong tool for the job. Not everything needs to be written in a low level language, but for the stuff that does, I’m glad Rust exists.

And I’m also glad that people who don’t understand the tradeoffs are “skipping” rust entirely. It’s not gatekeeping, it’s telling people who don’t want to be here that it’s ok: you don’t need to code in rust, maybe it’s just not for you.