this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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Rust
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It's quite reductionist (and weird) to describe Rust's type system in terms of it's borrow-checker only, ditto for describing the other simply as "GC'd languages".
The borrow-checker together with move semantics and RAII are a small, if dominating -especially for beginners-, part of Rust's type system. There are many other very relevant aspects, type classes (traits), sum types (enums), hell, not being OOP alone is a big win for many.
Talking about Rust only in terms of its type system would also be reductionist. The macro system alone is a big differentiator (I would know, because I've been working on a proc-macro crate for sometime which will support (de-)serializing a format with both more flexibility and reliability than what
serde
can offer).Even talking about Rust only in terms of the language is reductionist! The ecosystem and tooling... okay, I will stop reaching further here.
Talking about the other as "GC'd languages" is also reductionist and weird, since it puts, for example, Go (lol) and Haskell on the same bracket. And that's two strongly and statically typed languages. I could have picked two languages that are even more different than each other. "GC" as a differentiator for languages is actually even more reductionist than "borrow checker" for Rust.
Neither Rust is actively trying to be difficult, nor is it really difficult beyond some early friction while learning the language, and even that friction is overblown often by many.
We do actually have some data on this (I wouldn't dare calling it "research"). There is this part which actually relates to one of the arguments made in your YouTube link: