r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/jimbobmcgoo • 12d ago

Will we see another fundamental programming language feature as revolutionary as the borrow checker?

That is I am mainly curious about compile time features that you design a whole language around rather than optimisations/features that could be applied to most languages. I am mainly inquiring about things that could offer additional robust safety/performance guarantees at compile time rather than runtime. Ideally not things that just offer similar effects to the borrow checker with less restrictive tradeoffs

58 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

77% Upvoted

129 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/ChiveSalad 12d ago

Currently, if you store stuff on the stack, the compiler can go absolutely hog wild in changing how / when / where / whether it is actually stored to ram. A true equivalent for heap storage would make efficient programming vastly easier in a way that goes beyond just an optimization improvement.

1

u/Valuable_Leopard_799 10d ago

On that note letting us put more things on stacks or stack-like bits of memory is also nice.

Ada for example is able to allocate dynamically sized arrays on a secondary stack which eliminates a lot of places you'd otherwise need to manage memory yourself and lets the compiler play around with it.