A Rust Shaped Hole

Summary

A Rust shaped hole By a process of elimination, I've arrived at a conclusion that I should write Rust, or at least give it a rigorous try. Let us say I want to write a "native" program. This train of thought started with wanting to write a program, an xfdesktop replacement, that can serve as my desktop background, slowly meandering though a pastel game of life, or floating through a Mandelbrot set. But the specifics are not relevant, because I find myself on the same train when thinking of other native programs, CLI tools, etc that I want to write. My weapon of choice is TypeScript, a sword mighty yet light to wield, cutting through problems like butter. TypeScript also compiles to JavaScript, so it runs everywhere. Or does it? While I can jump through hoops to compile JavaScript into a binary, such wouldn't feel "solid". And the very point of writing a native program in the first place is to make it feel solid. Maybe this is preconception on my part, maybe one day the TypeScript -> JavaScript -> WASM -> binary pipeline will be straightforward, or maybe it already is and I just am not aware. That leaves me with the following options — C, C++, Go, Rust. Technically, there are a lot more options, and I wrote a long section here about eliminating them piecewise, but after writing it I felt like it was just noise. Of these, C++ is the easiest to eliminate. I once spent an entire year in the heaven of C++, walking around in a glorious daze of std::vector and RAII, before one day snapping out of it and realizing that I was just spawning complexity that is unrelated to the problem at hand. The experience was so vivid that I've never felt the urge to partake in C++ ever again. So C, Go and Rust. There are two dimensions at play here - "Simplicity" and memory management. I put simplicity in quotes because there is a more I need to say on that word. C is a simple language. This is fact I agree with and appreciate. It is the reason for C's endurance. If someone posts a patch o...