I’m talking about compile time.

Start with all of the known safe cases (basic types should be fine), then move on to more dubious options (anything that supports iteration). Then allow iterable types but don’t allow iterating over a mutable reference. And so on. If it’s a priority to loosen up the rules without sacrificing safety, surely some solutions could be found to improve ergonomics.

If you want guaranteed safety then the borrowing rules are the most flexible as far as we know.

Just to give a couple of examples of how your idea might be flawed, what do you consider “basic types”? Are enums basic types? Then you’ve got an issue, because you might get a reference to the contents of an enum and then replace the enum with another variant, and suddently you’ve got a dangling reference. Would you prefer to prevent creating references to the contents of an enum? Then you’re more restricting than the borrowing rules.

Allowing iterable types but not iterating over mutable references is not enough for safety unfortunately. The basic example is getting a reference to an element of a Vec and then calling push on the Vec. This seems very innocent, but pushing on a Vec might reallocate its backing buffer, making the previous reference dangling. Again, would you prevent taking references to elements of a Vec? Then again you become much more restricting than the borrowing rules.

I really liked the idea of an optional, built-in GC w/ pre-1.0 Rust where specific references could be GC’d

That was just syntax sugar for Rc/Arc, and you can still use them in today’s Rust, albeit with slightly worse ergonomics (no autoclone for example).

Sure, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be better.

It’s surely interesting though that people continuously complain about them and then praise a language whose equivalent feature is much more restrictive!

Surely the compiler could delay optimizations until the entire project is built, no? Then it knows what implementations exist, and the developer could then decide how to deal with that

It’s not really about optimizations but rather:

• when checking some impls for overlap, the compiler assumes that impls that the orphan rules block will never exist. You thus need to either disallow them (which would make the compiler more restrictive for non-application crates!) or a way to track them (which is easier said than done since coherence and trait checking is very complex)

• when generating code where specialization and/or vtables are involved. This could be delayed until the last crate is compiled, but at the expense of longer compile times and worse incremental compilation performance.

Sure, and ideally those cases would be accounted for,

AFAIK there’s nothing yet that can account for them without allocating everything on the heap.

or at the very least the dev could annotate each use to turn the borrow checker off for each instance, and that could print something at build time and a linter could flag over it. Unsafe blocks aren’t feasible for everything here.

You want some annotations to break out of the safe subset of the language but aren’t unsafe blocks basically that? Or perhaps you want something more ergonomic, at the expense of safety?

dreaded orphan rule

Yeah, that always struck me as stupid.

It is necessary to guarantee consistency in the trait system, otherwise it could lead to memory unsafety. Even relaxing it in cases where overlapping implementations could always be catched is still problematic because the compiler sometimes performs negative reasoning about traits that it know cannot be implemented downstream due to the the orphan rule.

And if you think about it the orphan rule is not worse than what other languages allow. For example C# only allow implementing an interface when defining a type, while the orphan rule also allows you to implement a trait when defining the trait itself. Not to mention being able to implement a trait only when a generic parameter implements another trait.

Yeah, the borrow checker is a bit too strict IMO. Ideally, the borrow checker would only trigger on things that could be run in parallel, such as with threads or async.

You can still trivially violate memory safety without multithreading or concurrency. The article touches on this a bit (they mention e.g. iterator invalidation) but they fail to address all issues.

https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2015/05/17/the-problem-with-shared-mutability/

While they don’t write it explicitly I think they’re looking for a good junior developer, given that:

• they are not asking for Rust work experience, instead for good Rust knowledge and experience with open source development, both of which you can obtain on your own if you’re a competent student

  • but also, is there even anyone that has experience in Rust and compiler/interpreter/typesetting development and is looking for a job? If they did require that almost nobody would qualify and the cycle of “I don’t have experience for applying to this job to get experience” would continue

• 57k€ is not a bad salary for a junior developer in Europe

• the two founders have graduated recently (~3 years ago) and have been working on Typst since then (their master thesis was on creating Typst itself), so it’s likely they are looking for someone like them.