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"Worthless" is a bit strong. The Rust devs want to add TCO/TCE, but there are still problems left to solve. The "become" keyword is reserved in anticipation of guaranteed tail calls.
https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/2691
I know it is common to think that Haskell is used only in academia and side/weird-projects, but there is a decent amount of companies using Haskell - e.g. we use Haskell in production for developing a DSL / web framework for building web apps (https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp)!
I participated teaching students Haskell on my alma mater this year and "what can Haskell be used for" was a common question, with genuine expectation that the answer will be it is limited to only specific use cases. I would answer that it can be used anywhere where languages like Java, C#, Go, and similar can be used -> it is a general programming language that uses garbage collector! And while somewhat harder to learn due to abstractions that we are all not used to, it is a delight to express business logic in it once you get to know it well.
The biggest factor for deciding if Haskell is a good fit for the problem is probably ecosystem support -> are there enough libraries and tools to support efficient development in a specific problem domain. In our case, we are building a compiler/transpiler, and Haskell is well-known for great support in that area, so it was a no-brainer. We were actually also considering Rust, but we just had no need for that level of memory control and rather decided to go with language where we don't have to think about that (Haskell).
The original rust compiler was written in OCaml [0], so I'd think OCaml had an outsized influence on Rust's design. Rust enums certainly look more like OCaml ADTs than Haskell's ADTs I think.
[0] This is the commit that removed the OCaml bits: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/6997adf76342b7a6fe0...
>You can build "product types with recursive values" in any language that remotely descends from C or Algol.
You cut off the part where I said sum AND product types. Variant and union are post C++11 and not traditionally part of Algol style languages. Even nowadays the only time I see variant is from some haskell engineer stuck on a C++ job.
>Pattern matching is not wide spread, but --while nice to have-- it's syntactic sugar.
No pattern matching is a safety feature. Most of rust code should be using pattern matching as much as possible. In fact there's a language called Elm that achieves a claim for code that has runtime exceptions via the pattern matching feature. See: https://elm-lang.org/
Don't believe me? You know about programmings biggest mistake right? Null? Well C++ sort of got rid of it by discouraging it's use but even with optionals the issue is still there because optionals can still crash your program.
With rust, optionals never crash unless you deliberately ask it to via unwrap. If you use pattern matching exclusively to unroll optionals a crash is virtually impossible. Try it, and try to guess how pattern matching prevents optionals from crashing your program in rust, while in C++ the lack of pattern matching forces empty optionals to crash.
>Rust's whole shtick is safe mutability.
Yes, but at the same time it's opt in. Algol languages are by default mutable and you have to opt in for immutability via keywords like const. Rust offers extended safety via a single usage mutable borrow ans single usage mutable ownership but this is opt in. You should be avoid using the keyword mut as much as possible.