I kinda disagree. The reason rust caught on is because it is much safer than C++ while having the same or even better performance. And in some contexts, being garbage collected means bad performance.

Before rust you could either have a fast language (C/C++) or a memory safe language (any other language. That is, languages with garbage collector). But if you required memory safety and peak performance, there wasn't any option.

Yes, the reason that rust is both memory safe and fast is because it has a borrow checker. But the borrow checker is the means, not the end.

[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (10 children)

Garbage collection doesn't guarantee memory safety and it's perfectly possible to create a memory-safe language without garbage collection. There are plenty of garbage collectors for C++ (and until C++23, support for garbage collection was part of the standard, although no one implemented it), and languages like C# let you interact with garbage-collected objects in unsafe blocks.

[–] Decq@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Exactly, if garbage collection meant memory safety then why do we get null pointer exceptions about every 5 minutes in Java. Garbage collection is about memory leaks, not safety. Imho the borrow checker is a better solution than garbage collection and faster to boot.

[–] zea_64@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 week ago

A null pointer exception is technically memory safe, you can get equivalent behavior with .unwrap() on an Option in Rust.

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