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See also:
Thomas Neumann's current proposal for memory safe C++ using dependency tracking:
- https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p27...
Google's proposal for memory safety using Rust-like lifetime analysis:
- https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-lifetime-annotations-for-c/...
- https://github.com/google/crubit/tree/main/lifetime_analysis
I think the future lies in figuring out how to get the benefits of that secret sauce, while mitigating or avoiding the downsides.
Like Boats said, the borrow checker works really well with data, but not so well with resources. I'd also add that it works well with data transformation, but struggles with abstraction, both the good and bad kind. It works well with tree-shaped data, but struggles with programs where the data has more intra-relationships.
So if we can design some paradigms that can harness Rust's borrow checker's benefits without its drawbacks, that could be pretty stellar. Some promising directions off the top of my head:
* Vale-style "region borrowing" [0] layered on top of a more flexible mutably-aliasing model, either involving single-threaded RC (like in Nim) generational references (like in Vale).
* Forty2 [1] or Verona [2] isolation, which let us choose between arenas and GC for isolated subgraphs. Combining that with some annotations could be a real home run. I think Cone [3] was going in this direction for a while.
* Val's simplified borrowing (mutable value semantics) combined with some form of mutable aliasing (this might sound familiar).
[0] https://verdagon.dev/blog/zero-cost-borrowing-regions-part-1... (am author)
[1] http://forty2.is/
[2] https://github.com/microsoft/verona
[3] https://cone.jondgoodwin.com/
Assuming you are serious, there is https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/tree/main/crane... which is written in Rust and is targeted to become the default debug backend in rustc. LLVM as accumulated a lot of optimizations contributed by many various groups and people. It's hard to catch up to that by virtue of resource limits.
The second someone makes a successor language that seamlessly/directly interops with C++ _AND_ has the level of build/IDE tooling that C++/Rust have, I'm on board.
The closest thing right now is Sean Baxter's "Circle" compiler in "Carbon" mode IMO:
https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/...
Unfortunately, Circle is closed-source and there's no LSP or other tooling to make the authoring experience nice.
Did you get a look at https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3446 at all?
The Kestrel web server[0] is an example of a codebase that makes extensive use of C#'s unsafe functionality. UnmanagedBufferAllocator[1], for example, looks pretty similar to how you'd write it in C++.
[0] https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/tree/1a56bdb671700ae698...
[1] https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/blob/1a56bdb671700ae698...