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Comment by hgs3 | Hacker News Reader

This is what bothers me about using Rust: it seems like Rust is trying to be both a systems language and a higher-level glue language in one, but (for me) it is cumbersome at both. If I need to write higher-level code then I'd rather use Go, Python, or whatever else and interface with C as needed. If I'm writing low-level code then I can use C and an embeddable scripting language for any high-level bits. This multi-language approach is not discussed enough. Recently, I completed a project that used cgo to interop C and Go code and the experience was very pleasant. No need for language workarounds or other code contortions. Just two languages doing what they do best.

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It’s a systems language (whatever that means). It can also be a glue language if you want it to be since it has high-level capabilities. Since being an austere systems programming language is kind of a defunct 90’s thing.

You argue that you would use a higher-level language for that part. Fair. But I don’t see the objective argument for using C for the low-level part. You just say that you want to use C. That’s preference and has nothing to do with Rust being a language that can do multiple things.

Your comment is about rust, but not at all related to the article.

The "workarounds or other code contortions" I'm talking about is the focus of the article. The point of the article is that safe Rust cannot directly represent circular data structures and therefore you need workarounds to represent them. My point is rather than fighting the borrow checker you could use two complimentary languages to achieve the same goal.

To add more context: I tried the articles suggestion and used integer handles some years back and shared my feedback on HN [1]. It wasn't a good experience as integer handles are just pointers the borrow checker doesn't know about. It made the implementation far more cumbersome than it needed to be.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32907482

focus of the article

That's a key difference - the article has a focus and your comment is generic and repetitive programming-language-war adjacent. There's even a guideline exactly about that - "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

That's my bad. I should have opened with my context first (see my remark about "I tried the articles suggestion") instead of sharing my conclusion.

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