Comment by cardanome
5 hours ago
> For example both think that a developer writing normal code should not have to worry about null pointers or be able to cause a use-after-free
Like 99% of all languages currently in use.
These things have long been solved way before Rust even existed. Rust has only filled the small niche of cases where you can't or don't want to use automatic garbage collection.
> complex type system
Python's type system is orders of magnitude more complex. Dynamic type systems are crazy powerful, this is why Typescript is such an complex beast.
Rust has static type checking, which is what you mean. Which also means that Rust is limited to the types that are can be expressed and are decidable with that system, while Python allows you to do... whatever and types are only checked at runtime or with external tooling.
Python's type system is easier to use but more complex. Rust's is simpler but harder to use. I know people forget the difference between complex and hard but it is an important one.
A better reason Python is Rust are seen together is that Python is an excellent glue language. Same reason people like C and Python. Plus both Rust and Python are pretty trendy these days.
> Like 99% of all languages currently in use.
Yes, but 90% of languages don't make a good complement to python. If you want to have a language to use in combination with python you want something with fast c-interop, which most garbage collected languages can't offer
> Rust has static type checking, which is what you mean
Maybe I shouldn't have used the word complex. But I did primarily mean that Rust uses the type system to ensure "safety", while Python primarily uses other methods. Yes, Rust doing static type checking is also an important component of it.
> A better reason Python is Rust are seen together is that Python is an excellent glue language
That would qualify any language as fitting well to Python. Which I don't agree with. C fits well to Python because it is a good complement: Python is slow to execute and easy to write, C is fast to execute and hard to write, and communication between the two is fast. Rust fits even better to Python because it's easier to write than C (well, easier to write correctly) and because interop is fast and convinient
> Like 99% of all languages currently in use.
That's true about memory, but nearly all mainstream programming languages have problems with null pointers: Java, C#, Go, etc.
This is mostly solved in C# - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/nullable-ref...