cyclone VS cyclone

One of the inspirations for Rust, as I recall, was Cyclone: https://cyclone.thelanguage.org/

Which was/is a "safe" dialect of C; basically C extended with a bunch of the stuff that made it into Rust (algebraic datatypes, pattern matching, etc.) Though its model of safety is not the borrow checker model that Rust has.

Always felt to me like something like Cyclone would be the natural direction for OS development to head in, as it fits better with existing codebases and skillsets.

In any case, I'm happy to see this stuff happening in Rust.

It sounds like they re-invented Cyclone.

https://cyclone.thelanguage.org

Looks like it was a research project and is now abandoned: http://cyclone.thelanguage.org

The borrow checker is Rust's secret sauce. It's the one thing no other language has. (Except Cyclone I think, which is an unmaintained research language.)

Also, lifetimes are not the mechanism by which Rust ensures safety - it's a necessary side-effect of the approach that Rust has taken, and this has nothing to do with the issues that "plague" other languages. Region-based memory management techniques are neither new nor really innovative. https://cyclone.thelanguage.org/, which directly inspired Rust, had them, and the authors gave up working on it because the ergonomics were terrible, as is the case with Rust. Lifetimes are needed for the Rust compiler to reason about what it can reasonably allow at compile time, but it, along with the Borrow Checker (which provides the actual safety net) ensures that whole swathes of valid programs are disallowed because the Rust compiler is not smart enough (and probably never will be) to check that these programs are valid.