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++”

I kinda disagree. The reason rust caught on is because it is much safer than C++ while having the same or even better performance. And in some contexts, being garbage collected means bad performance.

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). But if you required memory safety and peak performance, there wasn’t any option.

Yes, the reason that rust is both memory safe and fast is because it has a borrow checker. But the borrow checker is the means, not the end.

The “better” performance is due to the built-in multi-threading support, and that functional programming makes it relatively safer to pull off. Otherwise single-threaded Rust is very hard to optimize.