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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m a bit skeptical that a borrow checker in C++ can be as powerful as in rust, since C++ doesn’t have lifetime annotations. Without lifetime annotations, you have to do a whole program analysis to get the equivalent checks which isn’t even possible if you’re e.g. loading dynamic libraries, and prohibitively slow otherwise. Without that you can only really do local analysis which is of course good but not that powerful.

    Lifetime annotations in the type system is the right call, since it allows library authors to impose invariants related to ownership on their consumers. I doubt C++ will add it to their typesystem though.



  • To add on this, this doesn’t necessarily mean that there are fewer programing jobs in total. If people work 10% more efficently, that means that the cost of labor is only 91% of what it was before meaning that people might be able to afford to finance more programing projects. One thing that does matter is for example things like entry level jobs disappearing or the nature of the work changing. Doing less boring gruntwork can make the job more fun, but otoh digitization sometimes results in the worker having less agency in what they do since they have to fit everything into a possibly inflexible digital system.