Comment by verdagon

Like I mentioned in response to your other comment about this, the anecdotes were added to the borrow checking sections because that's what the initial readers were surprised about. That in turn made those sections longer. I also did mention the benefits of borrow checking (such as the concurrency benefits and influencing us into cleaner architectures), plus the downsides of garbage collection.

I didn't need any anecdotes for the borrow checker's benefits because everybody already knows them. I see how that can seem biased though, and next time I add citations to the surprising parts of an article I'll also add them more uniformly to the rest of the article as well.

Also, the article was about garbage collection itself versus borrow checking itself, not any specific languages that use them.

You make some valid comparisons between Rust and Java and Javascript, but garbage collected languages don't need to be dynamically typed, and don't need to have null, and don't need to have OOP patterns. When you compare Rust to a more modern language like Scala or Pony, you get a much truer comparison of the approaches.

That's what the article is really comparing: borrow checking versus garbage collection. Not the extra features that are correlated with them in mainstream languages.

Cheers!