alt Hacker NewsRust's appeal (to me) is safety, performance, DX in that order.
Where does Goose sit when classified along these dimensions?
Sure, performance is right there on the packaging but no word about UB in the README. I read "Goose has syntax familiar to C and Rust" as DX in the same ballpark, but is it a performance first or safety first language.
If it is the former it occupies the same crowded niche as C++ and its many cousins and will have a hard time.
If it's the latter it will have much more room to prosper. We don't have enough languages in the niche that Rust and Ada fill right now.
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Well, "safety" is a lot of things so you have to be a bit more specific than that about your use-cases. And I can't really answer it either way - I think WvO has to chime in about that himself - but I can point to some things that might give you some idea of what to expect. Here's what WvO wrote a few weeks ago when he shared Goose on twitter:
> Goose: my latest programming language. Safer, faster and less memory than Rust/C++ for algorithms where tightly packed, flat data structures matter.
> It can represent more kinds of data structures as flat, pointer-free bytes than any language I know.
https://xitter.cf/wvo/status/2107979660558766351
So one way to answer might be: how often do you reach for unsafe when using Rust? If you don't I guess Rust is safer. If you do… it gets trickier.
As for UB, I guess you could try looking through the spec and/or the reference? Like, the code is mostly generated by Claude after WvO wrote a specification. If it were anyone else I'd be worried, but given WvO's cv I actually suspect that means the spec leaves basically no ambiguity.
However, Goose compiles to C. Does that by definition mean UB sneaks in, or is there a "UB free" C subset? I don't write C, so I don't really know.
Goose is written by a game developer. They tend to concern themselves with C++'s niche.
Goose has no "unsafe" feature, and no undefined behavior, and is fully memory safe.
It is obviously has a lot of potential to be very fast.
It even does pretty good on DX. There is no borrow checker to fight. Algorithms that need indices in Rust are strongly typed references in Goose. Generally pleasant easy to read and write code.
The biggest thing against DX may be exactly where performance comes from: you need to think a bit on where to store your data :)