this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Programming
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If we’re looking at it from a Rust angle anyway, I think there’s a second reason that OOP often becomes messy, but less so in Rust: Unlimited interior mutability. Rust’s borrow checker may be annoying at times, but it forces you to think about ownership and prevents you from stuffing statefulness where it shouldn’t be.
To be fair, that's an issue in almost every imperative language and even some functional languages. Rust, C, and C++ are the only imperative languages I know of that make a serious effort to restrict mutability.
I also love this. I don't why but gc languages feel so incomplete to me. I like to know where the data is that I have. In c/c++ I know if I am passing data or pointer, in rust I know if it's a reference or the data itself. Idk, allows me to think better
How do C and C++ try to restrict mutability?
constThey don't do it well, but an attempt was made.
That does sound pretty cool.
Is there any reason an OO language couldn't have a borrow checker? Sure, it would be wildly more complex to implement but I don't see how it's impossible.
OO languages typically use garbage collector. The main purpose of the borrow checker is to resolve the ambiguity of who is responsible for deallocating the data.
In GC languages, there’s usually no such ambiguity. The GC takes care of it.
I would argue that rust has a very strong OO feature set (it just lacks inheritance which is the worst OO feature IMO). It is not seen as an OOP language as it also has a very strong functional and procedural feature set as well and does not favor one over the other letting you code in any style that best fits the problem you have.
So I would not say OO and a borrow checker are impossible or even hard. What makes less sense is a GC and the borrow checker. Though there are some use cases for having a GC for a subset of a program.