A D vs. Rust example

[Don Allen]

On Tuesday, 25 October 2022 at 17:37:22 UTC, Tejas wrote:
> On Tuesday, 25 October 2022 at 17:16:58 UTC, Don Allen wrote:
>> There's an awful lot of software out there written in gc-ed 
>> languages, e.g., Python, Go, Javascript, that we all use every 
>> day, even on our phones, and that performs adequately or more 
>> than adequately
>
>
> But Rust is a system level programming language, it was 
> designed for writing device drivers, filesystems, and other 
> resource constrained and latency critical software, where 
> languages with runtime environments can't be used, even if 
> you're okay with them

That's true and is essentially what I'm saying -- Rust is fine 
for what it was designed for, but it is not suitable for ordinary 
application development. But this is ignored by many in the Rust 
community and even by Mozilla, which, for example, is using Rust 
in Firefox.

>
> Even the actual software libraries used by higher level 
> languages in mobile applications are wrappers over the 
> extremely power/compute efficient C/C++ libraries that were 
> written with misery and paranoia, it's not as if a higher level 
> languages' tech stack doesn't involve lower level language, but 
> the opposite is true

Except I'm talking about the pain inflicted on the *user* of the 
language, not the pain it took to create the language and its 
supporting libraries.

>
> Thus, Rust always assumes the worst case scenarios and makes 
> the programmer distort their code to make it compile, and, 
> unless you use lots of unsafe, the code really belongs to "if 
> it compiles, it doesn't have memory bugs" camp of software

There are plenty of examples of gc-ed languages that do the same 
without Rust's difficulty.