Its an interesting idea. But if you want static memory safety in a low level systems language, its probably much easier to just use rust.
you can make a no-op function that gets compiled out but survives AIR
> rust knows when it can Drop.
and its possible to cause problems if you aren't aware where rust picks to dropp.
> And rust can put noalias everywhere in emitted code.
zig has noalias and it should be posssible to do alias tracking as a refinement.
> But if you want static memory safety in a low level systems language, its probably much easier to just use rust.
don't use that attitude to suck oxygen out of the air. rust comes with its own baggage, so "just using rust because its the only choice" keeps you in a local minimum.
Can you give some examples? I've never ran into problems due to this.
> don't use that attitude to suck oxygen out of the air. rust comes with its own baggage
Yeah, that's a totally fair argument. One nice aspect of the approach you're proposing is it'd give you the opportunity to explore more of the borrow checker design space. I'm convinced there's a giant forest of different ways we could do compile time memory safety. Rust has gone down one particular road in that forest. But there's probably loads of other options that nobody has tried yet. Some of them will probably be better than rust - but nobody has thought them through yet.
I wish you luck in your project! If you land somewhere interesting, I hope you write it up.
If it's doing a drop in the hot loop that may be an unexpected performance regression that could be carefully lifted.
thank you. Unfortunately in the last few weeks i've been too busy with my startup to put as much work into it. We'll see =D
Yeah, I've heard of people being surprised that when they make massive collections of Box'ed entries, then get surprised that it takes a long time to Drop the whole thing. But this would be the same in C or Zig too. Malloc and free are really complex functions. Reducing heap allocations is an essential tool for optimisation.
The solution to this "unexpected performance regression" in rust is the same as it is in C, C++ and Zig: Stop heap allocating so much. Use primitive types, SSO types (SmartString and friends in rust) or memory arenas. Drop isn't the problem.