doesnt rust still have the advantage of having no gc? I dont like writing rust, but the selling point of being able to write performative code with memory safety guarantees has always stuck with me
When I see Rust topping the "most loved language" on Stack Overflow etc. what I think is really happening is that people are using a "modern" language for the first time. I consistently see people gushing about, e.g., pattern matching in Rust. I agree pattern matching is awesome, but it is also not at all novel if you are a PL nerd. It's just that most commercial languages are crap from a PL nerd point of view.
So I think "no gc but memory safe" is what got people to look at Rust, but it's 1990s ML (ADTs, pattern matching, etc.) that keeps them there.
[1]: https://github.com/oxcaml/oxcaml
[2]: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/experimental/cc...
I think it was more about "the performance of C, but with memory safety and data race safety".
Yeah; this is my experience. I've been working in C professionally lately after writing rust fulltime for a few years. I don't really miss the borrow checker. But I really miss ADTs (eg Result<>, Option, etc), generic containers (Vec<T>), tuples, match expressions and the tooling (Cargo).
You can work around a lot of these problems in C with grit and frustration, but rust just gives you good answers out of the box.
OCaml's GC design is a pretty simple one: two heaps, one for short-lived objects and another one for the long-lived objects, and it is a generational and mostly non-moving design. Another thing that helps tremendously is the fact that OCaml is a functional programming language[1], which means that, since values are never mutated, most GC objects are short or very short-lived and never hit the other heap reserved for the long-lived objects, and the short-lived objects perish often and do so quickly.
So, to recap, OCaml’s GC is tuned for simplicity, predictable short pauses, and easy interoperability, whereas Java’s GC is tuned for maximum throughput and large-scale heap management with sophisticated concurrency and compaction.
[0] Maybe it still is – I am not sure.
[1] It is actually a multiparadigm design, although most code written in OCaml is functional in its style.
That surely has a performance cost.
A lot of effort went into making it efficient thanks to the web, while python sorta has its hands tied back due to exposing internals that can be readily used from C.