Safety is a nice side-benefit. The main reason why I like the safety is because it allows you to fearlessly write high-level code without being constantly paranoid about memory as in C++. It’s more about enabling ergonomics without loosing performance, rather than security or correctness.
With access to inline asm, all speed is ultimately more a measure of effort applied than PLang. So those perf ideas are just "with my level of effort". Even Python via Cython has pretty direct access to asm. The "do it in pure X" that Sun popularized (even in a meta-/cross-PLang-sense) as a business attempt to define Java virtual machines as The platform has had many casualties, not the least of which is the quality of discussion of PLang practicalities, not just on HN, but everywhere.
PS: I was very enthusiastic about Cython for a good while and I went deep into it, but I found that it is rather a mess to use in practice. Yes you get C performance within Python, kinda, but you also get all the C footguns, amplified by the complex interactions with Python features.
EDIT: With Cython how I mostly kept things organized was the "caller allocation" so common in C where memory was always managed the usual mostly refcounting way of CPython/NumPy, but I had dozens (maybe even 100) little "kernels" I could pass that memory into that could even use Intel/MSFT "intrinsic" asm calls (things like immintrin.h) or even just #include C code which did similar. It didn't seem too bad to me, but Nim always seemed a more complete solution (at the PLang level - not counting ecosys). (And these days there is even NimPy (https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy) to write low-level speed-up code for Python in Nim.)
Yes, you can pass around an object of procedures, but that is awkward, doesn't have any support from the language or stdlib, and from what I can tell isn't a normal thing that is done.
I think you & I are really back & forth-ing "the PLang not enforcing/strongly encouraging a very specific way of doing things that a whole ecosystem/community organizes around". Relying instead on self-organization has many pros & cons, to be sure. Lisp suffered much the same "until" Common Lisp (which still leaves many things open). My tag line lately is: delegation affords so much, but trust sure is tricky. Much of the time people seem to discount the often rather large cost of establishing/maintaining trust. (I'm not saying you are - just that it's an easy thing to do. I think it's why there is this is a big megathread on "trusting rust", even though "rust" is a veritable suffix of "trust". Lol.)
I'd disagree with this point, there is more typing involved with a first draft of code than Python or Typescript, that's certainly true, but if we bring all the tools (e.g. docblock comments for "type declaration") that are habitual to make up for the shortcomings in most developer's minds then that gap shrinks and, imo, ends up swapping. It's cheaper to have automatically enforced and consistently maintained checks than moving that information out of band and the resulting code in a strictly typed and memory enforced language ends up removing a significant cognitive overhead when reading and maintaining the code.
I have a strong aversion to boilerplate code so it's important to try and allow terse expressions when possible - but unstated assumptions are worse than overstated assumptions.
If I need the absolute fastest code, then that code will be tortured under valgrind. That’s non-negotiable in my book.
Code is not done until its memory management is proven correct.
The real shortcoming it is very common for people to not write modern C++. I know several C++ developers who refuse to use smart pointers because they don't like magic happening.
C++ has a terrible reputation which is well associated with, say C++98, if you have a good linter you can bop people on the head for using news anywhere outside a few limited locations where you consider it warranted. All working environments have language features or even programming paradigms that are considered detrimental to code ecosystem health and fighting against these is an organizational lift when working in any programming language. Full type security doesn't mean someone can't create an overly generic object and just start breaking code contracts across the code base. C++ has an awful lot of footguns and more warts than most but it can be made to be sane for development and the new language features really bring it on par with other modern languages.
I have worked in C++ (primarily within the Qt framework which pushed hard into const refs instead of pointers) and it's fine. I've also worked in PHP which can also be fine. Rust isn't something I've worked at scale in but it certainly is very attractive if I ever jump to an org working in it - but even in Rust you'll want to restrict style divergence and bad patterns with linting.
std::unique_ptr<int> p(foo());
std::print("{}\n", *p);
These issues will exist for all time. The only question is how rare can we make them.
The obvious follow-up is to find a minimal set of rules that allow us to express what we want without permitting temporal unsafety. The borrow checker is one set of fairly minimal rules that works pretty damn well. Alternatively you could define away the unsafety by giving it semantics, like fil-C does.
It is kind of annoying to use, but at least there is an obvious default choice.
Consider reading past the hashtag.