Discussion Thread: DIP 1028--Make @safe the Default--Final Review

[Arine]

On Saturday, 28 March 2020 at 14:18:46 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 March 2020 at 13:53:28 UTC, Arine wrote:
>> On Friday, 27 March 2020 at 09:26:35 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> On 3/26/2020 10:00 AM, jmh530 wrote:
>>>> I was talking about a hypothetical python person thinking 
>>>> about learning D, not about me personally.
>>>
>>> Consider how the Rust folk have been successful at getting 
>>> people to entirely re-engineer their programs and data 
>>> structures and learn an entirely different language to get a 
>>> small increment in memory safety.
>>>
>>> Rust's marketing department is very good.
>>
>> It's not marketing. They created a solution to a problem no 
>> one else has been able to.
>
> I think they created a solution to a problem 99.9% of 
> programmers don't have, which is "how to be memory safe without 
> using a tracing GC". The reason it's marketing genius is it'll 
> convince people who really really think "GCs are slow" without 
> ever having run a profiler. Genius, I tells ya. Genius.

Like I said, Rust provides more than only a safety guarantee. 
Something that a GC can't provide (on its own at least).

I see a lot of projects that are using C converting to Rust. That 
includes projects that Apple, Microsoft, etc is working on. D is 
advertised as a replacement for C and C++, but it really isn't. 
It's designed to be easily convertible from those languages but 
obviously that hasn't worked out, you don't get a benefit by 
keeping most of your same code and then trying to shoehorn in 
different design principles. People don't use C and C++ just 
cause they "think" GCs are slow. They use it because GCs don't 
fit their requirements. Otherwise there's a plethora of better 
languages that are built around solely using a GC, that have more 
options in terms of a better suited GC. I see Rust being used 
exactly where it makes sense to see it being used. As a systems 
programming language where C would otherwise have been used. I've 
also seen it used to replace GC languages like Go on servers as 
well:

Anyways, here's a good example of where GC failed to meet their 
requirements, and Rust solved their problem as it doesn't use a 
GC.

https://blog.discordapp.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to-rust-a190bbca2b1f