undefined

points

[-]

I don't think being low level is the main innovation, really. There are several things Rust did right over traditional ML. Explicitly caring about learnability and the "weirdness budget". Having great error messages that don't require a course in category theory (many ML) or 800kB of scrollback buffer (C++) to understand.

Having great tools. Excellent documentation. Being friendly to new users.

Yes, it's also a systems language without a runtime. But that's not the novel part. You could write horrors in C++ that approximate ML even without language support. There are eldritch libraries where some kind of pattern matching is done via generic lambdas.

The main difference is developper UX. Good tools, good error messages, quality of life. The novelty is making ML not painful.

by masklinn10 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

> Yes, it's also a systems language without a runtime. But that's not the novel part.

Low level strong correctness was absolutely a novel part. In fact it’s exactly why many people glommed onto early rust, and why it was lowered on the stack.

Although learnability and weirdness budgets were also extremely novel in low level contexts which had been subsumed by C and C++.

> horrors in C++

Yes, horrors in C++. Half baked jerry-rigged and barely usable nonsense. Not an industrial strength langage with a reliable type system and a strong focus on safety through types.

by uecker8 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Memory safety is not the same a scorrectness and more advanced type is also not the same thing as correctness.

by masklinn7 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

50 years of computing have proved pretty conclusively that less than that is wishful thinking at best. Large C++ programs, even with massive amounts of resources and tooling, can’t even get memory management correct.

by uecker6 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

That Rust gives you correctness is very misleading claim.

by gf0009 hours ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

These are all great qualities of rust, but they would not have been enough to make a dent.

Being memory safe without being managed is what makes rust a truly novel and interesting language for which it rightfully gets the hype.