> Unfortunately, most people seem to have taken the wrong lesson from Rust. They see all of this business with lifetimes and ownership as a dirty mess that Rust has had to adopt because it wanted to avoid garbage collection. But this is completely backwards! Rust adopted rules around shared mutable state and this enabled it to avoid garbage collection. These rules are a good idea regardless.
Yes, so much this! I'm using #Rust not because I'm building low-level resource constrained systems (far from it) but because it allows for local reasoning about state. Paired with the ML inspired syntax that makes pattern matching easy this leads to far more reliable programs.
This is also why I like #Clojure so much. Clojure's refs / atoms /agents allow for scoping mutability in an otherwise purely functional system. Scratch for the same itch. But Rust's compile time checking avoids pushing issues into the runtime, increasing reliability and hugely reduces time needed for debugging. The trade off here is no interactive / live development.
