Ah ok just read the article and not the proposal. I’m surprised that they went that far but as I wrote I think that lifetime annotations are a good idea, hope the C++ people find a way to add them to the language that actually works well, which sounds like an incredibly difficult task.

I’m a bit skeptical that a borrow checker in C++ can be as powerful as in rust, since C++ doesn’t have lifetime annotations. Without lifetime annotations, you have to do a whole program analysis to get the equivalent checks which isn’t even possible if you’re e.g. loading dynamic libraries, and prohibitively slow otherwise. Without that you can only really do local analysis which is of course good but not that powerful.

Lifetime annotations in the type system is the right call, since it allows library authors to impose invariants related to ownership on their consumers. I doubt C++ will add it to their typesystem though.

My favorite example of haskell arcane wizardry is löb. It’s mentioned in this list but not really done justice imo.

To add on this, this doesn’t necessarily mean that there are fewer programing jobs in total. If people work 10% more efficently, that means that the cost of labor is only 91% of what it was before meaning that people might be able to afford to finance more programing projects. One thing that does matter is for example things like entry level jobs disappearing or the nature of the work changing. Doing less boring gruntwork can make the job more fun, but otoh digitization sometimes results in the worker having less agency in what they do since they have to fit everything into a possibly inflexible digital system.

I’m using “OOP” more in the sense that is described in the article, but that is a fair perspective on rust and OOP. It is a term with a lot of different interpretations after all.

Curious to hear what in Rust could be more easily solved with OOP! I think one reason for rust not using OOP is because they want to minimize dynamic dispatch and keep it explicit where it happens, because it’s a language that gives you very fine grained control of resource usage, kinda similar to how you have to be explicit about copying for most types. Most trait calls are static dispatch unless you have a Box::<dyn SomeTrait>

What do you mean by its predecessor? C++? I think rust has a bunch of advantages. For one, designing a new language today gives you the benefit of hindsight meaning that they have a more cohesive set of features and a nicer standard library compared to C++ that has some bloat and cruft as a natural result of it evolving over several decades. It’s also much easier to reason about undefined behavior in rust thanks to unsafe. Algebraic data types are really nice and traits are better than classes.

The borrow checker isn’t just useful for low level programming. One of the other main selling points is “fearless concurrency” or essentially the fact that the borrow checker can help you reason about thread safe vs non thread safe data.

I dunno, CMake has one of the worst syntaxes I’ve ever seen, and despite that it’s one of the most popular languages used for C/C++ build scripting. This is because it has certain technical benefits compared to its competitors. I’m certain that having “bad” syntax is a disadvantage but it’s less important than other factors. Also I don’t think that Rusts syntax is universally disliked either.

If you’re hobby programming then do whatever you want obviously but if you’re part of some sort of larger project that’s trying to decide between Rust and C++ then subjective aesthetic arguments probably aren’t going to be considered as heavily as technical ones (and rightfully so), which in Rusts case could be that certain classes of bugs are impossible. That’s not to say that it’s not possible to make a technical case for C++ over rust but syntax preferences probably aren’t going to play a large role in how widely used either languages are, which is good.

I don’t think that everyone has to switch to rust or anything but “I dislike the syntax” and “I only want familiar things” are really bad arguments for not using a language. Try something outside of your comfort zone for a bit, it will help you grow as a programmer.

I’m surprised that no one seems to have brought up curl, which is maintained by Daniel Stenberg who is Just Some Guy™

How familiar are you with vim? You’ve been using it with vscode for a while so I figure you’re somewhat familiar with vim shortcuts? If you haven’t already, you should run through vimtutor. The built in help is very good in vim, it’s good to develop a habit of using :help and :helpgrep before googling. When in help pages you can use C-] to go to references in the documentation.

Some resources that I found useful when getting in to vim:

Articles: Oil and vinegar, Death by a thousand files

Talks: Let vim do the typing, How to do 90% of what plugins do with just vim

Speaking of plugins, tpope has an excellent repo of very good plugins that feel like they fit in very naturally with vim. I can especially recommend fugitive, commentary and surround