Having the ability to overload functions or constructors without a million Stuff::with_x variants is something I consider more ergonomic and not unsafe. I know the Rust community prefers explicitness in many places, but explicitness and safety are somewhat orthogonal in language design. I consider e.g. Swift to be a safe and ergonomic/sugared language, that borrows, no pun intended, a lot of ideas from Rust

As long as you limit yourself to a subset of modern C++, it’s actually a decent language. Less guardrails than Rust, but more syntactic sugar (think overloading, default parameters, implicit this, implicit reference-taking, implicit conversions). You could argue those are anti-features, but even as someone who really likes Rust, I gotta admit C++ is occasionally more ergonomic.

VSCode + CodeLLDB is great (and FOSS), surprised no one mentioned this yet

I know a bunch of larger C++ apps that use vcpkg for cross-platform (Windows/macOS/Linux) builds of their dependencies and it seems to work pretty well

When case insensitivity is the default I always wonder how many apps unknowingly rely on that due to typos somewhere. I encountered this once while porting a Windows/macOS app to Linux that someone imported a module with the wrong case and nobody noticed

Tbh rust-analyzer is still pretty great. What bothers me more is that Kotlin is pretty much the only language without an official language server, because it doesn’t align with their business interests…

It’s opt-in in Swift 5 mode and opt-out in Swift 6 mode, the Swift 6 compiler supports both modes though and lets you migrate a codebase on a module-by-module basis.

Agree that opt-in sort of defeats the point, but in practice it’s a sort of unavoidable compromise (and similar to unsafe Rust there will always be escape hatches)

Swift does have data race safety as of Swift 6 with their actor-based concurrency model and are introducing noncopyable types/a more sophisticated ownership model over the next few releases

Swift fits the description too

Not that specific tbh, most newer native languages these days are compiled and memory safe (Rust, Swift, Go, Kotlin Native, etc)

Coming from Haskell, OCaml always felt a bit strange to me. The double semicolons, the inconsistency in the standard library between curried and uncurried functions etc. Maybe I’m confusing it with Standard ML though, can’t remember.

Counterpoint, I believe the Swift syntax strikes a much better balance than Rust in terms of ergonomics and argument labels are awesome for designing fluent APIs. There are things that Rust does better, aside from having a bigger ecosystem, namely the whole borrowing/ownership system, though they’re catching up (noncopyable types and references are coming soon).

The concerns about ARC are generally a bit overstated, ARC only comes into play with classes, which modern Swift greatly deemphasizes in favor of structs, enums and protocols. Sure, sometimes you need them, especially when interoperating with Objective-C, but Rust has its escape hatches for reference counting too (Rc/RefCell, Arc/Mutex), those are just (intentionally) a bit more verbose.

In short, Swift encourages a very similar, value-oriented programming style as Rust with a modern type system (generics, associated types etc.), while offering lots of nice syntactic sugar (property wrappers, result builders etc.)

CMake can also emit its own errors during the configure step though, particularly if you have complicated build logic and/or lots of external packages.

That’s mostly still true, with the small caveat that the default prefix on arm64 macOS is /opt/homebrew rather than /usr/local, so you might have to add it explicitly to your PATH

Projects for Apple platforms usually also use .h, where it could mean anything from C/C++ to Objective-C/C++.

In practice, Clang handles mixed C/C++/Obj-C codebases pretty well and determining the language for a header never really felt like an issue since the API would usually already imply it (declaring a C++ class and/or Obj-C class would require the corresponding language to consume it).

If a C++ header is intended to be consumed from C, adding the usual #ifdef __cplusplus extern "C" {... should alleviate the name mangling issues.

or Swift, Rust has semicolons while Swift doesn’t

It’s open source though and they plan on adding Linux/Windows support in the future

Side note: Rust is the only of the three to have an ML-style type system, which is generally agreed upon as one of the most theoretically sound foundations. Also the point is that Rust does it precisely without requiring dynamic allocation, as opposed to Go, for example.

Not OP, but a pretty common reason is having a super-modular and hackable IDE that can be used to develop pretty much anything. Everything is JSON-configurable, all editors are webviews, so adding stuff like HTML rendering in Jupyter notebooks is almost trivial from a technical perspective. Fleet might be a step in the right direction, but still feels like a layer on top of IntelliJ, which is a beast in of itself, plus it is closed-source.

Also the approach of decoupling editors from the language support via LSP might be one of the biggest innovations in this space in recent years, IMO. Having a widely adopted and open protocol for language support effectively made Neovim, Emacs etc. a viable choice. It has spawned several high-quality LSP implementations, often directly supported by the compiler vendors, e.g. clangd or rust-analyzer.

Arguably Microsoft has been monetizing a bunch of services on top of VSCode too and they haven’t always stuck to their own principles (see Pylance, a closed-source language server that only runs in official VSC builds), but the LSP itself was still a pretty big net positive.

Swift does, though using the dollar sign rather than underscores