On Borrow Checking

[jmh530]

On Monday, 12 May 2025 at 16:11:18 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> On Monday, 12 May 2025 at 13:45:04 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
>> But I think "what people want" and "what's the goal here" are 
>> two different kinds of questions. What people want is more 
>> powerful safety analysis. But the reason why Walter started 
>> working on this was that he saw safety as becoming a bigger 
>> issue in programming languages, most notably with Rust gaining 
>> traction, and wanted to help D compete on that basis.
>
> Here, you say that the goal of @live is to compete with Rust on 
> safety.
>
>> So I think one thing that has Walter frustrated is that he 
>> wants to be able to say D has a borrow checker when someone 
>> asks, but the actual users don't want something unless it 
>> actually enables the more powerful safety analysis.
>
> Here, you say that the goal of @live is "to be able to say D 
> has a borrow checker."
>
> The problem is that these are not the same goal. Walter's work 
> on @live has (arguably) succeeded in advancing goal #2, but it 
> has done nothing to advance goal #1.
>


In my view, competing with Rust and being able to say that D has 
a borrow checker are the same thing. My point was that what 
people really want is more powerful safety analysis. Sorry if 
that was confusing.