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by mrkeen 232 days ago
> I’m still shocked by the number of people who seem to believe that the borrow checker is some kind of magic.

It shouldn't be magic. It should be routine and boring, like no-nulls, pure functions, static typing and unit tests.

1 comments

From my point of view, no, it shouldn’t be routine. Lifetime annotations and borrow checking are pretty far from the sweet spot of easy to deploy, useful and get out of the way when it comes to static analysis.

Honestly, Ada is a far better choice than Rust when it comes to the safety/usability ratio and you can even add Spark on top which Rust has no equivalent of. But somehow we are saddled with the oversold fashion machine even when it makes no sense. I mean, look at the discussion. It’s full of people who don’t even know what static analysis is but come explaining to me that I am a C zealot stuck in the past and ignorant of the magnificence of our lord and saviour Rust. I don’t even use C.

I don’t care that people rewrite stuff become they want to be cool. If they maintain them, it’s their responsibility and their time. I do care about distribution replacing things with untested things to sound cool however. That’s shoddy work.

I also deeply disagree that pure functions should be the norm as an Ocaml programmer. They have their place but are no panacea either. That’s the Haskell hype instead of Rust hype this time.