Conversation

There's lots of lessons we should be learning from Rust, but ‘it's fine to put memory safety on the TODO list’ seems like a… weird thing to take away outside of very specific use cases.

When people criticize Rust's complexity, the response is often to depict this as ignorant because *of course* all the major complexity in Rust follows naturally from its requirements and ... I kinda wonder how much that has to do with it :-\

Like. All new systems languages should be memory safe. Or it's not possible to do high-control / low-overhead memory safety in a simpler or substantially different way from Rust. Pick at most one, I think.

To be fair though, the fact that you need much more specialized kinds of expertise to come up with designs in this area is probably the main bottleneck. If you know about compilers and computers, you can make a new systems language. If you also want it to be memory safe, well...

(Btw. Which languages are we talking about here in the first place, w.r.t. it being a trend? Carbon does seem like a very specific use case to me; and then there's Zig, which by itself would just be a one-off.)

Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

I've been more grumbly than I am comfortable with being over the past day tbh so I'm wary of dishing out names and almost considering deleting some tweets. This stuff is really hard and not saying I could do any better as well. I could list some privately if it helps.