> Maybe sometimes the language feels like trying to keep a piece of heavy duty machinery from killing you, but they're willing to wrestle with it for the power you get in return.
It's funny because to me there's an analogy with heavy machinery but materially different: there are some industrial machines that have two buttons that need to be actuated to activate the mechanism, separated by arm length in order to ensure that the operator's arms are out of the way when the limb crunching bits are moving. I see Rust that way, engineering the safe way to do things as the path of least resistance, at the cost of some convenience when trying to do something "unsafe".
Okay, but now imagine a kitchen appliance that did the same thing. It would not be a big seller. Of course a kitchen appliance can injure and even kill you, but it probably wouldn’t unless you try really hard.
Most of programming is like that, but in the few cases where there literally are lives at stake, memory safety by itself will not do much for you and performance is going to be a secondary concern.
Zig does have safety features that C/C++ do not have, but also one should not underestimate the security implications of language complexity by itself.
It's funny because to me there's an analogy with heavy machinery but materially different: there are some industrial machines that have two buttons that need to be actuated to activate the mechanism, separated by arm length in order to ensure that the operator's arms are out of the way when the limb crunching bits are moving. I see Rust that way, engineering the safe way to do things as the path of least resistance, at the cost of some convenience when trying to do something "unsafe".