Comment by hu3
3 months ago
There were languages with lifetimes and borrowing mechanics before Rust. Rust packages these mechanics in a nice way. Just like Zig encodes many niceties in a useful C language (comptime, simple cross-compilation, stdlib).
Which ones?? Before Rust, to my knowledge, no language had an actually practical way to use lifetimes and borrow-checking so that both memory safety and concurrency safety (data races, which is huge) were solved, even though the concepts were known in research. Doing the actual work to make it practical is what makes the difference between some obscure research topic and a widely used language that actually solves serious problems in the real world.
Cyclone for one, which AT&T created exactly to replace C.
Yeah but is that a practical language people can use instead of C and Rust? I’ve always heard of it only as a research language that inspired rust but nothing else.
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