Rust Programming

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People who REALLY like the features of Rust and think it can do everything really well, would you rather competing languages adopt similar features or just have everything converge to using Rust? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 years ago by AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml to c/rust@lemmy.ml

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Something I'm genuinely curious about with people who really like Rust, and want it to be used for everything. If you had a say, which way of the programming ecosystem developing would you personally prefer, and why? Like, if Go or C++ started developing features similar to Rust, like a borrow checker and better compile time error checking, would you see that as a good thing that other languages are getting the same benefits of Rust? What about other organisations started making new programming languages with similar benefits as Rust? Or would you rather that none of those happened and everything that wants Rust's benefits just converged to using Rust?

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[–] asonix@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 years ago

I love writing rust and I've done all my personal projects for the last 4 or 5 years in it, but I dont think it's a good idea for other existing languages to adopt more of Rust's features.

Languages like Elixir or Lisp are so different it doesn't make any sense to adopt Rust semantics or syntax, and anything with a garbage collector, Go included, doesn't need to care about ownership, borrowing, or lifetimes (besides the usual passing references being cheaper than passing whole objects).

Languages like C or C++ can definitely be replaced in many cases with Rust, but I dont think making them more like rust is a wise decision. Adopting something like a borrow checker in c or c++ completely changes the language in a way thats not only backwards incompatible, but also probably not welcome by developers already working in those languages.

All this to say: I'd prefer more people to work in rust than to alter other languages to be more like rust, but I also think there are a number of other languages worth learning and working in. To a large extent, choosing a language is about taste.