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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

By patching C like this, wouldn't you end up with Rust or something very similar before you know it?

safe Rust isn't just the borrow checker, it's also:

  - no uninitialized memory
  - clone vs copy semantics as part of the type system
  - Send, Sync, "fearless concurrency"
  - no unchecked indexing
  - type safety (you can't just cast things like in C)

I do think these are clear complements to a borrow checker, since it's all in the interest of preventing undefined behavior. Yet, there are even more nice modern features of Rust that C lacks:

  - hygienic macros
  - namespaces
  - pattern matching
  - modern build/package system

Good point.

Also proc_macros. Often Rust ends up easier to read than Python due to proc_macro abstractions, too. Serde is a great example for this.

Rust is really high-level when you use it correctly.

And I rarely need lifetime annotations. Which is especially easy if you write in a somewhat functional style.

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