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Comment by earenndil | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a fairly nice website. For someone coming from a background of C and D, but familiar with quite a few others, I have to ask: what makes rust different and better? Aside from memory safety, what reason do I have to choose rust over another language?

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Good (and improving steadily) compiler feedback, centralized package manager, thoughtful approach to language versioning, a syntax that I like (very subjective), and the flexibility to write unsafe code blocks if for some reason you need to. Those are some of my reasons for liking it.

I would add: The most cohesive and supportive large-scale community I have ever seen for a programming language. The Rust team goes to great lengths to maintain a culture of constructive debate and good behavior. As a professional community builder I am in awe of the culture Rust has achieved in its inner circle as well as its extended ecosystem.

Resource safety and expressiveness on level of Python (or close) combined with speed of C.

That said, while I love the idea of Rust I find the language itself offputting somehow. I don't know, maybe I just need to give it another try.

For me it's a love hate thing. I love the way it stops me from doing dumb shit, and really makes you think hard about how to architect properly.

I hate annoying little nitpicky stuff like it won't auto-upcast a u8 to an i32, for example. There should at least be a compiler flag to allow that.

I mostly love it though. The stuff that bothers me is relatively minor and I think will go away as I get more fluent with the language.

How are those different from, say, d, nim, or lisp?

Did you have another language in mind? Eg Rusts safety means basically nothing if you are comparing it to Python or C#.

Not really, I more meant "in what situations should I choose rust and what makes rust the best choice in that situation instead of _any_ other language."

Python stops you from accidentally sharing mutable state across threads?

Yes. Look up the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock).

Which is why Python doesn't have thread locking... Except, it does.

Perhaps that's because GIL isn't really helpful for preventing logical races? Yet it encourages a false sense of security?

The GIL doesn't stop you from sharing mutable state across threads, nor does it make it generally safe to do so.

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