A D vs. Rust example

[IGotD-]

On Friday, 21 October 2022 at 14:04:25 UTC, Don Allen wrote:
>
> 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.

It already exists and it is called Swift. A few engineers from 
the Rust team helped engineer Swift. The syntax similarities 
between Swift and Rust are obvious. In Swift they added a lot of 
lowering in order to hide the more explicit Rust syntax. If you 
see the results after the lowering then the Rust syntax shines 
through even more.

Swift added reference counting as GC (much because of 
objective-C) and the result is that the language is quite usable, 
much more easy to use than Rust. You will not end up with 
senseless life time compiler error as in Rust.

Swift isn't safe as "nothing can go wrong" but safe enough for 
me. For embedded systems, Swift isn't an ideal candidate as it 
relies on its own foundation library, objective-C runtime and C++ 
standard library. Though there has been people who has 
successfully ported Swift to OS-less systems.