Relevant comment

I don’t use Rust much, but I agree with the thrust of the article. However, I do think that the borrowchecker is the only reason Rust actually caught on. In my opinion, it’s really hard for a new language to succeed unless you can point to something and say “You literally can’t do this in your language”

Without something like that, I think it just would have been impossible for Rust to gain enough momentum, and also attract the sort of people that made its culture what it is.

Otherwise, IMO Rust would have ended up just like D, a language that few people have ever used, but most people who have heard of it will say “apparently it’s a better safer C++, but I’m not going to switch because I can technically do all that stuff in C++”

“apparently it’s a better safer C++, but I’m not going to switch because I can technically do all that stuff in C++”

The main difference between C++ and D was that (for most of the time in the past) D required garbage collector.

So, D was a language with similar Algol-style syntax targeting a completely different niche from C++.

Trying to correct your quote, it should read something like “I’m not going to switch because I can’t technically do all that stuff in D that I’m doing in C++” for it to make any sense.

“Before rust you could either have a fast language (C/C++) or a memory safe language (any other language. That is, languages with garbage collector).”

Ada managed to do safe and fast over forty years ago.