I have been following rust very closely since 2013.
As Rust is both evolving and spreading wide, we; the programmers, users of Rust; are also leveling up in how we approach correctness and design with it.
Maybe the next evolution will be something like Haskell but fast like Rust is fast like C without the pain of C++.
But it takes a while for the world to catch up, and for everybody to explore and find ways to work with or around the abstractions that helps with correctness.
It's a bit like the evolution from a pointer to some malloc memory, then the shared/unique pointer of C++, to the fully safe box/(a)rc of Rust.
It might be obvious today how much more efficient it is programming with those abstractions.
I see some similarities with functional programming that still seems so niche. Even though the enlighteneds swears by it. And now we actually seem to be slowly merging the best parts of functional and imperative together somehow.
So maybe we are actually evolving programming as a species. And Rust happens to be one of the best scaffold at this point in history.
There is hardly any evolution from pointer to malloc, C is one of the few systems languages, including those that predated it, where one needs math to allocate heap memory.
I do agree that the evolution is most likely a language that combines automatic resource management with affine/linear/effects/dependent/proofs.
Or AIs improve to the point to render all existing programming languages a thing from the past, replaced by regular natural languages and regular math.
As Rust is both evolving and spreading wide, we; the programmers, users of Rust; are also leveling up in how we approach correctness and design with it.
Maybe the next evolution will be something like Haskell but fast like Rust is fast like C without the pain of C++.
But it takes a while for the world to catch up, and for everybody to explore and find ways to work with or around the abstractions that helps with correctness.
It's a bit like the evolution from a pointer to some malloc memory, then the shared/unique pointer of C++, to the fully safe box/(a)rc of Rust.
It might be obvious today how much more efficient it is programming with those abstractions.
I see some similarities with functional programming that still seems so niche. Even though the enlighteneds swears by it. And now we actually seem to be slowly merging the best parts of functional and imperative together somehow.
So maybe we are actually evolving programming as a species. And Rust happens to be one of the best scaffold at this point in history.
Thank you for reading my essay.