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Comment by Yardlink | Hacker News Reader

Is there are reason this language exists? They're solving a problem that's been solved many times over for at least 2 decades in the form of managed languages.

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Because Rust's "managed" benefits are compiled away, they have zero runtime impact. Meaning that there's no reason it couldn't be as fast as C/C++ for all workloads. So you get a safe language with bare-metal performance. (Bare metal like, people have written basic OS kernels in it.)

Actually, many people have been waiting long for such a language to come out, and are very excited about Rust for good reasons.

Managed languages solve a large set of problems, but introduce two big problems as I see it:

- Cause nondeterministic overhead which is particularly problematic for kernels, games, and software with heaps over, say, 10 gigabytes.

- Limit ability to safely pass objects outside their ecosystem. How many libraries written in managed code are worth using outside of the language they are written in?

Actually it depends on what one understands by managed.

Strong typed languages with automatic memory management, having native compilers and used for writing OS, exist since Mesa/Cedar (70's at Xerox PARC)

Back when C was UNIX only, no one talked about C ABI. The only ABI that mattered was the OS ABI.

Amoeba, OS/400, Lisp Machines, Oberon are a few examples of having multiple languages interoperate via the OS ABI..

I was just alluding to the fact that garbage collection runtimes are quite less than ideal if another system calls into them sporadically. It just doesn't fit well for software libraries intended to be language-agnostic.

I just jumped the gun, because many tend to think stronger typing that what C offers is a synonym for managed.

Regarding the interoperability, it really depends at what level OS, GC or RC services are available.

If just on the language runtime, yes it complicates the distribution of libraries. As it raises the issues how many copies of the runtime one gets and version compatibility issues.

If the OS offers the services, then any language on that specific OS, can enjoy exposing libraries that interoperate with GC or RC.

COM (now WinRT) is a possible example of such OS services.

> They're solving a problem that's been solved many times over for at least 2 decades in the form of managed languages.

With the overhead of GC...

Because strong type alternatives to C and C++, like Modula-2, Modula-3, Ada, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, ... faded away while UNIX conquered the enterprise.

Now to get back what was lost in terms of safety, new languages are required, as the old ones are considered legacy by the average Joe/Jane coder.

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