alt Hacker NewsI wouldn’t say so… I consistently choose Rust mainly because it’s a sanely designed modern C++ alternative. It’s 20% more effort than writing Python or Typescript, and you get to use the full power of your hardware without compromise.
Safety is a nice side-benefit. The main reason why I like the safety is because it allows you to fearlessly write high-level code without being constantly paranoid about memory as in C++. It’s more about enabling ergonomics without loosing performance, rather than security or correctness.
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> It’s 20% more effort than writing Python or Typescript
I'd disagree with this point, there is more typing involved with a first draft of code than Python or Typescript, that's certainly true, but if we bring all the tools (e.g. docblock comments for "type declaration") that are habitual to make up for the shortcomings in most developer's minds then that gap shrinks and, imo, ends up swapping. It's cheaper to have automatically enforced and consistently maintained checks than moving that information out of band and the resulting code in a strictly typed and memory enforced language ends up removing a significant cognitive overhead when reading and maintaining the code.
I have a strong aversion to boilerplate code so it's important to try and allow terse expressions when possible - but unstated assumptions are worse than overstated assumptions.
The paranoia about memory use in C++ should mostly be a thing of the past if you’re using smart pointers and sane patterns. In 2026 almost nobody should be calling new and delete and passing around raw pointers.
Most things like "sanely" and "20%" are pretty subjective. To me writing (or really reading well written) Nim (https://nim-lang.org) is less effort than writing Python or Typescript. Nim is mostly Ada & Lisp ideas packaged in a more terse & flexible surface syntax. Nim also has nice compile-time introspection and very low effort macros to allow packaging near zero-code APIs like github.com/c-blake/cligen. Also, something like 5 out of 5 times I've investigated some Rust alternative to some Nim code, the Rust ran more slowly than my Nim on my tested CPUs.
With access to inline asm, all speed is ultimately more a measure of effort applied than PLang. So those perf ideas are just "with my level of effort". Even Python via Cython has pretty direct access to asm. The "do it in pure X" that Sun popularized (even in a meta-/cross-PLang-sense) as a business attempt to define Java virtual machines as The platform has had many casualties, not the least of which is the quality of discussion of PLang practicalities, not just on HN, but everywhere.