> Then I thought "why not just remove the borrow checker?" without any real motivation.
Reminds me of a chemistry kit I had as a kid. None of this tame, safe stuff you can buy these days. Mine was a gift from my dad and I never thought of asking him where he dug it up, but it had stuff like pure sulfuric acid in it.
One day, when I was done with all of the experiments I had planned to do, I decided to mix a few things and heat them up, just for fun, without any real motivation other than "let's see what happens".
Let's just say I was lucky we only had to replace some of the clothes my mom had left out for me to put away. ;)
> Another point is, as you guys are well aware, the borrow checker will reject some valid programs in order to never pass any invalid program. What if I'm sure about what I'm doing and I don't want that check to run?
Then you do it using the "unsafe" keyword, and you think long and hard about how to design and structure the code so that the unsafe code is small in scope, surface, and blast radius.
That's precisely what unsafe code is for: to get around the borrow checker and assert you know what you're doing. Of course, if you're wrong, that means your program will blow up, but at least you know that the culprit is hiding in one of those unsafe areas, rather than literally anywhere in the whole codebase.
Alternately, you can switch to a language with a different ethos.
The ethos of Rust is caring for memory safety so much that you willingly limit yourself in terms of what kind of code you write and you only step out of those limits reluctantly and with great care. That's something that resonates with a lot of people and Rust has been built on top of that for years.
If you suddenly take the product of those years of hard work, strip out the foundation it has been built on, and unironically offer it as a good idea, a lot of people won't like it and will tell you so. Mind, I'm not excusing the personal attacks, I'm just explaining the reaction.
Reminds me of a chemistry kit I had as a kid. None of this tame, safe stuff you can buy these days. Mine was a gift from my dad and I never thought of asking him where he dug it up, but it had stuff like pure sulfuric acid in it.
One day, when I was done with all of the experiments I had planned to do, I decided to mix a few things and heat them up, just for fun, without any real motivation other than "let's see what happens".
Let's just say I was lucky we only had to replace some of the clothes my mom had left out for me to put away. ;)
> Another point is, as you guys are well aware, the borrow checker will reject some valid programs in order to never pass any invalid program. What if I'm sure about what I'm doing and I don't want that check to run?
Then you do it using the "unsafe" keyword, and you think long and hard about how to design and structure the code so that the unsafe code is small in scope, surface, and blast radius.
That's precisely what unsafe code is for: to get around the borrow checker and assert you know what you're doing. Of course, if you're wrong, that means your program will blow up, but at least you know that the culprit is hiding in one of those unsafe areas, rather than literally anywhere in the whole codebase.
Alternately, you can switch to a language with a different ethos.
The ethos of Rust is caring for memory safety so much that you willingly limit yourself in terms of what kind of code you write and you only step out of those limits reluctantly and with great care. That's something that resonates with a lot of people and Rust has been built on top of that for years.
If you suddenly take the product of those years of hard work, strip out the foundation it has been built on, and unironically offer it as a good idea, a lot of people won't like it and will tell you so. Mind, I'm not excusing the personal attacks, I'm just explaining the reaction.