> Garbage collection and virtual dispatch are completely different things; having one in no way moves us closer to the other.
Right, of course not. The comparison was philosophical rather than technical.
My point was that I believe there's a "sweet spot" for a language that is expressive and convenient and modern, but also tries hard not to stray too far from C's spartan abstract machine model (and when it does, it exposes that complexity in a composed pluggable fashion).
I'm beginning to believe rust really has a shot at replacing C and needs to court "bare metal" programmers as well as higher-level programmers to do it; I'm just preemptively registering my wish that rust continue to head down that path.
Rust will not replace c, rust is a more refined c++. If you want something to replace c have: a better type system, raii, better macros, better lifetime management, etc but keep it simple and don't layer it.
The best way to make that wish come true is to use Rust in a project where you would normally use C, and report your experience to help us discover the best ways to support that use case. :)
I think what personally got me excited about this direction were the many "OS kernel in rust" hobby projects [1, 2]. For some reason these strike me as a sort of reverse canary-in-a-coal-mine to judge whether a language is seen as a potential C replacement.
Prior to rust the hobby OS dev community was primarily C / asm with some honorable mentions for other languages. It's also something of a stand-in for the requirements of the professional embedded community.
For these use cases, it's just really cool to be able to use more and more "layers" of the language as you implement more of the underlying abstract machine model.
Right, of course not. The comparison was philosophical rather than technical.
My point was that I believe there's a "sweet spot" for a language that is expressive and convenient and modern, but also tries hard not to stray too far from C's spartan abstract machine model (and when it does, it exposes that complexity in a composed pluggable fashion).
I'm beginning to believe rust really has a shot at replacing C and needs to court "bare metal" programmers as well as higher-level programmers to do it; I'm just preemptively registering my wish that rust continue to head down that path.