[vacuity]

Thank you for your insights. I think this comes down to a culture problem. Some people such as myself obsess over the low-level details, so every usage of Vec stands out immediately. At the same time, many people like to use Rust in areas where heap allocations and the like aren't as significant, where GC languages would typically be used too. Discussions of memory safe languages are flawed, as you point out, though I feel like Rust is just the poster child and not a unique instance. What I take away from Rust's philosophy usually comes from the Rust team who develop the language, and I find them to generally be levelheaded when it comes to discussing Rust's merits and drawbacks. I do think Rust is a highly promising language, for which its team tirelessly addresses its major flaws[0], but it doesn't excuse hype-induced bias.

[0] I can't say it'll ever compile as fast as, say, Go, but all the work on compile times is impressive

[scuff3d]

I think that's honestly been a success for Rust nobody really talks about. It's enabled people who would never write in a non-garbage collected language to do just that.

Between the borrow checker and Cargo, it's brought system engineering to a whole group of people that never would have touched it before. People who don't want to deal with memory management can write code that doesn't require a GC. And they can easily pull in dependency for things they don't want to write.

[smj-edison]

I can attest to that. I had tried learning C++ previously, but getting started as a beginner is a bit of a nightmare (maybe that's because I was using Linux, so I couldn't use Visual Studio, but there's still a ton of complexity).

I was able to work through the Rust book though, and that was a great way to ease into the more difficult parts of systems programming.

I'm not contributing to a C project, but I feel a lot more comfortable since Rust caught all my early dumb mistakes, so I've learned to avoid the things that would shoot me in the foot.