How Rust[ine] has blown my mind
after 30 years of programming experience!
2022. Absolute shock. Incredible explosion. Strongest intellectual orgasm in years!
How… come? Let me explain.
I’ve started programming computers about 30 years ago — as a kid — with Basic and Pascal, followed by C/C++, Java, and then prolonged C#/.NET experience (2002–present), plus a bit of Swift and Objective C (2017–present), too.
I did live some mind shifting/lifting moments in my life. Such as when Pascal introduced me to structured programming. Or when Java and C# came with their unifying “everything is an object” approaches. Or, later, when Swift has shown me the best syntax ever (with argument labels migrated from Objective C, wow!), and removed nil even for reference types unless explicitly permitted by the developer through an Optional type forever.
But… none of these events had been [perceived] as powerful in my mind as… [drums/spoiler alert:] the Rust’s borrow checker!
Indeed: malloc and free were my best friends for so long, time ago (although I’ve been… betraying them too often, must admit; let’s say due to… human nature). Then Java had introduced the garbage collector and I thought: “this is excellent!” — although performance was sometimes affected. To improve the runtime again…
