Huang: Rust: A Critical Retrospective

Posted May 24, 2022 21:40 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Huang: Rust: A Critical Retrospective by kleptog
Parent article: Huang: Rust: A Critical Retrospective

> Yes, it's a bit of a pain that Rust is pretty strict about it, but I believe it makes you a better programmer and you get better programs.

Rust gives you optional reference counting and you can even build your whole program on top of Arc links. If you are not clever enough to use other tools and if you don't plan to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your code.

But it's visible in the code. And it doesn't feel “lightweight” because ARC is not lightweight. People did measurements and Swift is much slower than Rust or C++ for many code patterns because of ARC.

Sure, if you want to attract developers who are accustomed to C# or Java then ARC may be a good choice, but if you are doing low-level stuff then ARC use has to be explicit.

> Also, integrating reference counting into code written in other languages is tricky, I'm curious how they plan to handle that.

That part is fine. ARC is local, it's not like tracing GC which insists on violation of any and all good engineering principles to solve problem which doesn't exist.