> The lifetime of an Arc isn’t unknowable, it’s determined by where and how you hold it.
In the same sense that the lifetime of an object in a GC'd system has a lower bound of, "as long as it's referenced", sure. But that's nearly the opposite of what the borrow checker tries to do by statically bounding objects, at compile time.
> maybe the disconnect in this article is that the author is coming at Rust and trying to force their previous mental models on to it
The opposite actually! I spent about a decade doing systems programming in C, C++, and Rust before writing a bunch of Haskell at my current job. The degree to which a big language runtime and GC weren't a boogeyman for some problem spaces was really eye-opening.
In the same sense that the lifetime of an object in a GC'd system has a lower bound of, "as long as it's referenced", sure. But that's nearly the opposite of what the borrow checker tries to do by statically bounding objects, at compile time.
> maybe the disconnect in this article is that the author is coming at Rust and trying to force their previous mental models on to it
The opposite actually! I spent about a decade doing systems programming in C, C++, and Rust before writing a bunch of Haskell at my current job. The degree to which a big language runtime and GC weren't a boogeyman for some problem spaces was really eye-opening.