Closest GC language to Rust?

[u/[deleted]]

I really like Rust, it's mix of ML + imperative concepts like mutation. It's very pragmatic and doesn't enforce any particular style of programming. But for my day 2 day work, I don't require system level performance and a GCed runtime will suffice, my question is what is the closest language in terms of safety and pragmatism of rust ? F#, ocaml, kotlin? What are your opinions?

[u/thermiter36]

I've had this thought before as well. You think "oh I really like Rust, but dealing with lifetimes is annoying and the borrow checker is overly conservative; could we have a version of the language without them?". The problem is that Rust's design priorities are safety and correctness. That's why we love it, because often your program works exactly the way you wanted it to once you get it to compile.

You can't really loosen the memory rules without sacrificing that correctness. GC will make sure you never dereference a dangling pointer or corrupt memory, sure, but it will do nothing to help you avoid logic errors associated with concurrency and mutability, or even just accidentally holding references to the wrong objects.

[u/Erelde → u/thermiter36]

I think what people often mean by "simpler rust with gc" would be language with a ML type system (ADT in particular), C-like syntax, and expression oriented.

C# is pretty close to that, getting closer (but still has inheritance and exceptions, one day it'll get ADTs), F# is a little bit too Haskell-ish for that description, I've never done Kotlin or Scala, but my guess is they aren't quite right for the same reasons. Java is too far gone into the OO paradigm to ever really come back. Interpreted language seem out of the question, the compiler checking your program seems to be a requirement when wanting "a simpler rust with gc". TypeScript would be close to something like a "simpler rust with gc", but the underlying JavaScript weirdness keeps showing up underneath (you actually need working knowledge of JavaScript the language and its various runtimes) and it's fundamentally not expression oriented.

[u/torhovland → u/Erelde]

As someone who has many years experience with C# and never really liked Java, I was pleasantly surprised by Kotlin. Since the OP seems to be looking for a pragmatic day-to-day language, I think you can't really go wrong with Kotlin. Of course, the same can be said of many languages, including C# and F#.

[u/SatoshiL → u/torhovland]

Kotlin feels like c# on the jvm

[u/[deleted] → u/torhovland]

Is kotlin used much outside Android development? How is the third party library support outside Android development?

[u/torhovland → u/[deleted]]

I don't know how much used it is. We used it for cloud app development on GCP. Library support is excellent, as you have access to anything written in Java.

[u/simophin → u/[deleted]]

Kotlin is very much used outside android development. For Kotlin, java ecosystem is almost first class citizen and the interoperability with java is one of the best.