undefined | Better HN

0 pointsbrabel7mo ago0 comments

I appreciate both OCaml and Rust, but your view seems to be entirely wrong to me, sorry to be blunt.

People wouldn't care much for Rust at all if it didn't offer two things that are an absolute killer feature (that OCaml does not have):

* no GC, while being memory safe.

* high performance on par with C while offering no-cost high level conveniences.

There's no other language to this day that offers anything like that. Rust really is unique in this area, as far as I know.

The fact that it also has a very good package manager and was initially backed by a big, trusted company, Mozzila, while OCaml comes from a Research Lab, also makes this particular race a no-brainer unless you're into Functional Programming (which has never been very popular, no matter the language).

0 comments

lmm7mo ago

>> a) new language does some unique thing that the old language didn't do, even if the unique thing is useless and irrelevant

>> b) new language has a bigger number than old language on benchmarks, even if the benchmark is irrelevant to your use case

> * no GC, while being memory safe.

> * high performance on par with C while offering no-cost high level conveniences.

My point exactly!

> was initially backed by a big, trusted company, Mozzila, while OCaml comes from a Research Lab

Mozilla is not large and trustworthy, as you can see by the fact they haven't kept funding Rust development (because they can't afford to)! People weren't picking Rust because it had better backing or a bigger ecosystem, not in the early stages that made the difference - it didn't.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse