Comment by fooker

I hope you realize how your critique is identical to the critiques people have about IPv6

Is your claim that the borrow checker is the problem? That’s a really difficult design space to beat Rust in:

1. Shared mutable data structures to allow high performance code

2. No GC to allow high performance code

3. Non lexical lifetimes to allow flexibility in memory ownership for expressivity and performance (ie you can’t restrict allocations to never escape a lexical lifetime)

Capability based systems might avoid the Rust borrow checker but they’re even more verbose with annotations and complex than Rust.

Effects systems show some promise but not yet proven they can actually be a general purpose language like Rust (ie do the ideas scale well to multiple different problem domains).

Anyway, there’s lots of alternative ways of designing languages but they all come with undesirable tradeoffs. Would be better if you actually made some concrete proposals that Rust gets wrong rather than “it’s too complex - they should have made it simpler” without taking any position - always easier to critique from the sidelines without making a proposal of your own that can be critiqued.

this seems somewhat unlikely to me. My guess is that we'll see a continued split where Rust takes the low level like OS kernels and cryptography that need time consistency and adversarial security guarantees, while most higher level programs (apps/databases etc) are written in fast garage collected languages (e.g C#/Julia).