Memory Safe Languages in Android 13
As an Android user ever since the T-Mobile G1, I'm a fan of not having my phone remotely exploited via WebView, or with an SMS, or the other million ways there are to interact with a device, so I absolutely celebrate this progress.<p>As an Android developer though, I have to be the one bitter old man yelling at cloud. I was spoiled by Java and Kotlin to the point where I cannot look at Rust and think it's a nice modern language.<p>Yes, I will start a language war today. Rust is like a truck driver who tried to make a race car that doesn't blow up. It's safe but it does not look refined. I wish you knew how weird Rust looks to me. I tried to learn it 3 times and had to give up after all the WTFs. I said it in the past, and I'll say it again:<p>* What the hell kind of language choice is to force everyone to type "#[derive(Debug)]" for annotations? I'd rather write past the end of an array and have someone steal my Bitcoin wallet than press "shift 3 bracket shift 9 shift 0 bracket" at the top of my structs. What's wrong with @? Nothing. @derive(debug). 2java4u? Ok, [derive debug] then.<p>* What's with the ' everywhere? Not the quote, the piece of dirt on your display. Why are our displays so dirty?<p>* Going for super short keywords "let", "fn", "mod", but then, "let mut" could have been "var". When is typing speed the bottleneck in writing software where you can't take the time to type out "module" or even 'function'? Come on now.<p>* print! now! fast! it's! a! macro! why! are! we! yelling!<p>* Passing "self" as the first argument was bullshit in Python, and it's bullshit in Rust too. Don't look at me like that - the compiler can inject it as the first parameter without requiring you to type it in.<p>* What does "::" do that "." can't? That's right. Nothing. All hail D.<p>D got language design right. Syntax better than Rust. CTFE better than Rust. Templates better than Rust. Marketing worse than Rust, though.<p>I'll try to learn Rust a 4th time now to stay relevant in the Android world, because I have bills to pay, but I want you to know that I blame each and everyone of you weirdos for not holding language designers to a higher bar.<p>Edit: if you downvote, reply with a link to the last compiler you wrote.