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by Zambyte 223 days ago
The main problem that Rust tries to solve, and that functional programming (which Clojure heavily leans into) solves, is avoiding shared mutable state, which leads to data races and (potentially subtly) wrong concurrent programs. Functional programming avoids shared mutable state by avoiding mutable state. Operations are only represented as transformations instead of mutations. Other languages like Erlang / Elixir use message passing techniques like the Actor Model to avoid shared mutability. Instead of avoiding mutability, like in functional programming, in the Actor Model you avoid sharing, by instead sending messages around.

Rust is interesting because it solves the problem of shared mutable state, while allowing sharing, and allowing mutability, just not at the same time. State can be mutated until it is shared. While it is shared, it cannot be mutated. This is the goal of the ownership system in Rust.
2 comments
SkiFire13 222 days ago
> The main problem that Rust tries to solve, and that functional programming (which Clojure heavily leans into) solves, is avoiding shared mutable state

I would argue that avoiding _unrestricted_ shared mutable state is a mean for Rust, not a goal. The main goal would be to provide a way to make safe, fast and non garbage collected programs, which doesn't seem at all what clojure is aiming for.

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pjmlp 222 days ago
As proven by ongoing research in things like Linear Haskell, one doesn't need to throw GC productiviy away, to get deterministic resource management.

Best part of Rust is catering to a crowd that not even at point gun will consider touching anything that might resemble having any kind of automatic resource management.

Hence why I consider articles like "How We Saved 70% of CPU and 60% of Memory in Refinery’s Go Code, No Rust Required" [0] interesting to read and make awareness, even if Go isn't one of the languages I happen to be entusiastic about.

[0] - https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/how-we-saved-70-cpu-60-memory-...

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codesnik 222 days ago
Well, erlang and elixir operate on almost exclusively immutable data, in addition to message passing between "processes". They are more strict than most other languages in that regard.
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Zambyte 222 days ago
Mutation occurs at the actor level. Their state is mutated by changing how they respond to future messages.
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