Re:The borrowchecker is what I like the least about Rust
by johnnyanmac on Saturday July 19, 2025 @11:22PM
(#44621704)
It was interesting towards the latter half of the article where the author talks about how much of the correctness may be culturally enforced:
>More amorphous, but not less important is Rust's strong cultural affinity for correctness. For example, go to YouTube and click on some Rust conference channel. You'll see that a large fraction of the talks are on correctness, in some way or another. That's not something I see in Julia or Python conference talks.
And it creates an interesting chicken and egg approach. The borrow checker may indeed be too strict (and of course, has its edge cases and outright bugs), but its existence (rather than the utility it brings) may have in fact attracted and amassed an audience who cares about correctness above all else. Even if we abolished the borrow checker tomorrow, this audience may still maintain a certain style based on such principles, party because the other utilities of Rust were built around it.
It's very intriguing. But like anything else trying to attract people, you need something new and flashy to get people in the door. Even for people who traditionally try to reject obvious sales pitches.
>More amorphous, but not less important is Rust's strong cultural affinity for correctness. For example, go to YouTube and click on some Rust conference channel. You'll see that a large fraction of the talks are on correctness, in some way or another. That's not something I see in Julia or Python conference talks.
And it creates an interesting chicken and egg approach. The borrow checker may indeed be too strict (and of course, has its edge cases and outright bugs), but its existence (rather than the utility it brings) may have in fact attracted and amassed an audience who cares about correctness above all else. Even if we abolished the borrow checker tomorrow, this audience may still maintain a certain style based on such principles, party because the other utilities of Rust were built around it.
It's very intriguing. But like anything else trying to attract people, you need something new and flashy to get people in the door. Even for people who traditionally try to reject obvious sales pitches.