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0 pointstux31mo ago0 comments

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.

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masklinn1mo ago

> 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.

uecker1mo ago

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

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gf0001mo ago

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.

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