My experience is that this is an initial hurdle to clear. As an example, I've almost exclusively worked in GC'd languages for a while, and after learning Rust for a few months I very very rarely have borrow check errors.
The fact that it occasionally requires a complex pattern to do right should get better with time (non-lexical lifetimes would help), and there's also discussion around GC integration so that you could interact with a scripting language GC when writing a plugin for it, or you could farm out GC'd objects when you need to have cycles (i.e. in graph algorithms).
> the Chrome guys have gone in the direction of deploying a GC into C++
Interesting. I'm curious how much of the browser relies on it. I'm also curious whether it's an attempt to paper over C++ with a little memory safety, or whether it actually offers performance improvements. My original point was not that GC is bad, per se, but that I quite like being able to avoid it when it's reliable to do so, which is not the case in C++, IMO.
[0]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/09/generational-garbage-colle...
[1]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/07/compacting-garbage-collect...
That said, it's not even like a single-GC approach is incompatible with Rust: https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/08/26/javascript-serv...
> I see a lot of people talking about "fighting the borrow checker" with Rust
> that would be simple in any other language,
1) Rust appears to be significantly less productive than a true GCd language. I see a lot of people talking about "fighting the borrow checker" with Rust and I see a lot of articles describing basic patterns that would be simple in any other language, but are complex in Rust.
2) If you want to invoke code that assumes a GC you need to have one.
You can do manual memory allocation in Java by the way and a few high performance libraries do. It's just not common.
It's interesting to note that the Chrome guys have gone in the direction of deploying a GC into C++ whereas the Mozilla guys have gone in the direction of moving manual memory management into the type system. I've got nothing against Rust but I'm a Chrome user, personally.