Rust has been my favourite language since 2013. I constantly miss its ownership model when working in other languages (which most commonly means JavaScript for me).
Certainly not everything is a good fit for Rust’s ownership model, but honestly most code benefits from it at least a bit, and steadily more and more is being figured out about how to mesh other models into it without too much pain. It’s very liberating, protecting from various mistakes that are too easy in other languages (and that’s specifically where I miss it).
Ownership modelling can require more effort initially if the problem doesn’t match Rust’s capabilities very well (or put another way, if the problem doesn’t match how hardware works without garbage collection), but subsequently it’s liberating to not need to worry about various problems that are ubiquitous in other languages.
I reckon it similar to the debate of static versus dynamic typing, though more subtle. For toys, dynamic typing is adequate and static typing a burden, but as you scale a system up, dynamic typing makes life harder and requires more discipline to avoid ossification or drowning from technical debt. It’s taken time, but there has been a significant resurgence in static typing as people slowly come to realise its value through bitter experience in dynamic typing. Like static typing, a strict ownership model requires more effort initially, but makes life easier down the path, and I expect that at least the basic concepts of it will be picked up in more languages new and old over time (this has started already, actually, with Swift and D springing to mind), though it’s probably a harder concept to beneficially retrofit to a language than static typing.
You may want to mutate and forget about ownership, but Rust doesn’t let you do this, and it’s for your own good ;-). In time you get more of a feeling of why it is the way it is and learn to appreciate it.
Certainly not everything is a good fit for Rust’s ownership model, but honestly most code benefits from it at least a bit, and steadily more and more is being figured out about how to mesh other models into it without too much pain. It’s very liberating, protecting from various mistakes that are too easy in other languages (and that’s specifically where I miss it).
Ownership modelling can require more effort initially if the problem doesn’t match Rust’s capabilities very well (or put another way, if the problem doesn’t match how hardware works without garbage collection), but subsequently it’s liberating to not need to worry about various problems that are ubiquitous in other languages.
I reckon it similar to the debate of static versus dynamic typing, though more subtle. For toys, dynamic typing is adequate and static typing a burden, but as you scale a system up, dynamic typing makes life harder and requires more discipline to avoid ossification or drowning from technical debt. It’s taken time, but there has been a significant resurgence in static typing as people slowly come to realise its value through bitter experience in dynamic typing. Like static typing, a strict ownership model requires more effort initially, but makes life easier down the path, and I expect that at least the basic concepts of it will be picked up in more languages new and old over time (this has started already, actually, with Swift and D springing to mind), though it’s probably a harder concept to beneficially retrofit to a language than static typing.
You may want to mutate and forget about ownership, but Rust doesn’t let you do this, and it’s for your own good ;-). In time you get more of a feeling of why it is the way it is and learn to appreciate it.