New competitor to D

[Don Allen]

On Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 21:25:28 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> On Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 16:27:25 UTC, Tejas wrote:
>> There is a new language that claims to be the successor to C++ 
>> in town, and it's got Google's funding 😥
>>
>> It's called carbon
>>
>> https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang
>>
>>
>> What do you folk think?
>>
>> If this succeeds, then Google will have the advantage in cross 
>> platform code (with Dart) as well as high performance 
>> code(Carbon)
>
> It looks more like a Rust replacement to me. Nothing is written 
> about the memory management but they hint that they want to use 
> some kind of life time annotation like Rust. That is enough for 
> me wanting to avoid it.
>
> Since there are no plans for full meta programming, then it is 
> no D or C++ replacement. Rust replacement maybe.
>
> It's another me too Rust language. Good, then D can let other 
> language imitate Rust instead.

Because I am at a time in my life where I can do things such as 
this, I have written about 10,000 lines of Rust. I have described 
it as programming while wearing a hair-shirt while on a bed of 
nails. What I learned from this exercise is that there is a very 
large cost, in the sense of a steep learning curve and continuing 
demands on the programmer, to providing memory safety without a 
garbage collector. The Rust Kool-aid drinkers, who appear to be 
mostly from the C++ community, don't seem to have much experience 
with garbage-collected languages and therefore don't understand 
the tradeoffs. It's the classic shiny new object to them.

If I were charged with developing an application where C or C++ 
would be an appropriate choice (a situation requiring absolutely 
predictable latency and/or small footprint), I'd certainly 
consider Rust as a safer, less bug-prone alternative. But 
choosing Rust in situations where Go or Nim or Haskell or D would 
get the job done is, to me, completely crazy. As a (now-retired) 
software manager, if I had a deadline to meet, I wouldn't even 
think about using Rust. And I say this having tested the waters.