| > your argument doesn't hold water, because you are appealing to the existence of a schroedinger's programmer that simultaneously would use rust but also wouldn't turn on a borrow checker if it existed in another language. I'm appealing to the existence of people who would like rust very much, but find the borrow checker to be cumbersome / annoying / difficult. I suspect a lot of people would fall into this camp. Including a lot of people who admire Zig, Jai, Odin, dmd. And probably a lot of C++ developers. In my opinion, most of the best parts of rust have nothing to do with the borrow checker. For example, sum types, the rust standard library, cargo & crates.io, traits, Result / Option, editions, rust's unit testing, etc. If someone released a borrow checker for zig, would it get 100% adoption? No way. Especially if it was hard to learn, required adding unfamiliar "lifetime annotations" throughout your code and sometimes required you to refactor functions that you know are correct anyway. > Here's the thing. Rust is currently "the only game in town" for spatiotemporal memory safety and that is sucking the air out of the atmosphere, because no one wants to invest time into trying other ideas. [...] Those of us who don't want that kind of BS in our language have to constantly be accused of not caring about memory safety which is hardly the truth. I think we've found agreement. I've been saying this for years - Rust is humanity's first serious attempt at a programming language like this. Its like the first iPad. I think there's lots of ways a rust successor could learn from rust's mistakes and make a better language. I'm really looking forward to what a borrow checker might look like a few more languages down the line. |