The main purpose of Rust is to be a practical, safe alternative to C++. Go and D are NOT such languages, because of the mandatory garbage collection. From time to time there's been efforts to replace C++ with safer garbage collected languages such as Java or C#, and every time it basically failed. Direct control over memory has been proven pretty much essential in high-performance software. Thus, we're still stuck with C++, and we're still suffering for it, having nightmarish bugs and myriads of security holes and whatnot.
Rust at least tries to make an honest effort to change that. If and when it gets really fleshed out it'd be a boon to all those poor developers. And please forget your awfully subjective qualms about syntax (seriously, go and program in Haskell if you're all for pretty syntactic and cohesiveness - though I can't guarantee you won't find it "disgusting"). Memory management in the C++ way is bloody hard, and it's a dirty affair. It makes no sense to be repulsed by all the complexity there, because it's unavoidable, and it's a job that has to be done. Of course there's going to be a smattering of syntactical constructs to make memory management less tedious, just like there is extra syntactic baggage on bigger Haskell programs to accommodate the fine control over side effects.
Having a memory safe high-performance language with C++-like memory management is a HUGE thing. A while ago I would have dismissed such a thing as a pipe dream, and when I became convinced that Rust could work it was a moment of great rejoicing. Even if Rust ends up on the dumps, there has been at least an effort, and maybe someone will make a better Rust some day.
So please try to understand the purpose and rationale behind Rust before dismissing it in a superficial way.
"When you enter SafeD, you leave your pointers, unchecked casts and unions at the door. Memory management is provided to you courtesy of Garbage Collection."
I don't see how you make the leap from a syntax you don't like, to the language lacking cohesion. In my experience Rust code looks perfectly cohesive, and once you have the sigils in your head you simply parse them as what they mean.
To give an example, I don't believe that this code:
If you don't need a systems language than for christ's sake don't use or learn one. Go use your go. shoo. Also, you care about syntax, others care about safety and correctness. It's not your cup of tea but no need to be all "this is a horrible language" crap. I dare you to have a face to face discussion with anyone on the development team and see if you'll talk so big then.
> Go is also a systems programming language so I don't know what you mean. I would like to use Go, yes, and I do when I have a chance.
Go is a fully garbage collected language that doesn't offer a lot of support for manual memory management (and that isn't intended to attack Go—it just wasn't one of its goals). Rust is a low-level systems language that allows full control via zero-cost abstractions, but is safe. Achieving that goal requires some new machinery and syntax. Systems programming often entails writing for environments in which you can't use a GC (or even any runtime at all) for performance or other reasons.
> Also your point about syntax vs safety and correctness makes no sense, since it implies that those are mutually exclusive so I'm just going to ignore that one.
Rust has a unique feature—manual memory management with safety—so it needs syntax for it. It's not just syntax for its own sake—it's what gives the language a niche all its own.
