Comment by pkolaczk

Not sure if it is strictly better, probably not, but it is actually damn close to being better in most domains and not worse in the others. I've been developing a GUI app in Rust, and even though this is an area considered widely a very bad fit for a borrow checker and a non-OOP language like Rust generally, the borrow checker was never an issue for me (and it still helped in a few places to get e.g. concurrency right). An occasional Rc/Refcell here and there does not outweight the other advantages. Definitely not any worse than Java Swing in terms of productivity, but way better in terms of the end result (which launches in 0.1 seconds, has no visible lags and uses native window controls).