Rust is more popular than all of these languages except swift combined. So it seems empirically that ergonomics and expressiveness don't matter that much or these languages don't manage to do significantly better than rust.
It appears more popular, which isn't the same thing.
Re:Swift is a more convenient Rust
by tialaramex on Friday September 06, 2024 @04:21PM
(#41469432)
If you have better metrics then that's interesting, otherwise it just looks bitter.
Yeah, maybe chicken nuggets only appear more popular than broccoli. But I think since we don't have any actual evidence to say otherwise we can assume that's because they are in fact more popular than broccoli.
There’s lots of interesting ideas in languages but most of them fail to be mainstream at all. When comparing new languages at the level of Rust, Swift, Go and maybe Kotlin are the only real competitors.
However outside very specific use cases, where no kind of automatic resource management is allowed, no matter what, like in high integrity computing, or critical kernel code, approaches that mix and match both solutions are much more ergonomic.
Swift isn't the only one going down this route, we see it as well in D, Chapel, Linear Haskell, OCamml Effects, Mojo, Hylo, Koka, Veronica, and probably many other research languages being born during the last 5 years.
Because in the end, programming language ergonomics and expressiveness really matters for wide scale adoption.