Four Years of Jai (2024)

> I’d be much more excited about that promise [memory safety in Rust] if the compiler provided that safety, rather than asking the programmer to do an extraordinary amount of extra work to conform to syntactically enforced safety rules. Put the complexity in the compiler, dudes.

That exists; it's called garbage collection.

If you don't want the performance characteristics of garbage collection, something has to give. Either you sacrifice memory safety or you accept a more restrictive paradigm than GC'd languages give you. For some reason, programming language enthusiasts think that if you think really hard, every issue has some solution out there without any drawbacks at all just waiting to be found. But in fact, creating a system that has zero runtime overhead and unlimited aliasing with a mutable heap is as impossible as finding two even numbers whose sum is odd.

The faster computers get, the more the GC problem is way overblown apart from super-low-latency niches. Even AAA games these days happily run on GC languages.

There is a prominent contributor to HN whose profile says they dream of a world where all languages offer automatic memory management and I think about that a lot, as a low-level backend engineer. Unless I find myself writing an HFT bot or a kernel, I have zero need to care about memory allocation, cycles, and who owns what.

Productivity >> worrying about memory.

>Even AAA games these days happily run on GC languages.

Which games are these? Are you referring to games written in Unity where the game logic is scripted in C#? Or are you referring to Minecraft Java Edition?

I seriously doubt you would get close to the same performance in a modern AAA title running in a Java/C# based engine.