It seems to me like the designers really couldn't make up their minds.
Do you want GC or not? Do you want lightweight threads or not? What level of runtime requirements do you want?
Its finally converging on something sane, but its taken a while.
Do you want GC or not? Do you want lightweight threads or not? What level of runtime requirements do you want?
Its finally converging on something sane, but its taken a while.
The other two are really part of the same coin. Having green threads involves having a runtime that has to be started. Deciding to remove the runtime means removing the green threads.
I don't want to make it seem like I'm coming down too hard on Rust however, and I'm excited to see how everything works out once version 1.0 is released.
Do you have any alternatives to implementing a strong type system in order to give certain well-defined safety guarantees for anyone using the language? Any other alternative theories or implementation strategies that would be better?
> I'm more partial to the Go style of language design, which focused on making it easy to do the things the designers did in practice.
The designers/implementers wrote the first non-bootstrapped compiler in OCaml, a functional language. How's that for "things the designers did in practice"?
As far as doing what they were doing in systems programming in practice: the point of the project is to actually get away from their then heavy use of unsafe languages like C++. But then they took the concepts of smart pointers, ownership etc. (presumably inspired by best practices in C/++) and tried to make it bulletproof to use.