A D vs. Rust example

[Don Allen]

On Friday, 21 October 2022 at 07:02:01 UTC, rassoc wrote:
> On 21/10/2022 05:36, Don Allen via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> As I said in my original post, this kind of code is very 
>> common in Scheme.
>>
>
> Right, I walked that path before, even shiny R7RS, and I'm glad 
> I went to speech therapy for my lisp.
>
>> where multiple closures refer to several of them and the 
>> closures are called in multiple places
>>
>
> National Spaghetti Day is coming up on January 4th. ;)

You should have gone to another therapist to correct your 
tendency to offer opinions about code you haven't seen.

>
> In all seriousness, though, I'm not here to invalidate your 
> experiences with Rust. While I've been using D for quite a bit 
> now, I get to experience some pretty uncomfortable cognitive 
> dissonance doing so. I still love it, but D often times offers 
> a slightly less performant and reliable way to tackle a certain 
> set of hard problems. Even if I never get to experience Rust 
> professionally, I'm still quite happy that it set a new 
> baseline for safe languages to come and evolve to.

Since you've said something substantive, I'll comment. I actually 
agree with you that Rust has shown the world that inherently 
memory- and thread-safe languages are possible. Haskell did some 
of that before Rust did, but they didn't quite finish the job.

But I think there is an opportunity to create a memory-safe 
language with a GC that avoids many of the difficulties of Rust. 
And I think thread-safety should be an option, not a requirement, 
because there are applications that are inherently 
single-threaded. Those applications should not have to adhere to 
the rules that keep multi-threaded applications safe, as is the 
case in Rust, the only alternative being to sprinkle your code 
with "unsafe" blocks, or use thread_local!, which works, but 
makes the code similarly messy.