I agree transpile to C will not result in the fastest code (and of course not the fastest toolchain), but having the ability to convert to C does help in some cases. Besides the ability to support some more obscure targets, I found it's useful for building a language, for unit tests [1]. One of the targets, in my case, is the XCC C compiler, which can run in WASM and convert to WASM, and so I built the playground for my language using that.

> transpiling to C (even Go and Lua)

Go: I'm sorry, I thought TinyGo internally converts to C, but it turns out that's not true (any more?). That leaves https://github.com/opd-ai/go2c which uses TinyGo and then converts the LLVM IR to C. So, I'm mistaken, sorry.

Lua: One is https://github.com/davidm/lua2c but I thought eLua also converts to C.

> Your only forced to use it when you’re storing references within a struct.

Well, that's quite often, in my view.

> Not sure when the last time was you tried to write rust code.

I'm not a regular user, that's true [2]. But I do have some knowledge in quite many languages now [3] and so I think I have a reasonable understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of Rust as well.

> Any language targeting the performance envelope rust does needs GC to be opt in.

Yes, I fully agree. I just think that Rust has the wrong default: it uses single ownership / borrowing by _default_, and RC/Arc is more like an exception. I think most programs could use RC/Arc by default, and only use ownership / borrowing where performance is critical.

> The main disadvantage of Rust, in my view, is that it's verbose. >> Sure, but compared to what?

Compared to most languages, actually [4]. Rust is similar to Java and Zig in this regard. Sure, we can argue the use case of Rust is different than eg. Python.

[1] https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang [2] https://github.com/thomasmueller/lz4_simple [3] https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang/tree/main/src/test... [4] https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang/blob/main/doc/conc...

> I'm not a regular user, that's true [2]. But I do have some knowledge in quite many languages now [3] and so I think I have a reasonable understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of Rust as well.

That is skewing your perception. The problem is that how you write code just changes after a while and both things happen: you know how to write things to leverage the compiler inferred lifetimes better and the lifetimes fade into the noise. It only seems really annoying, difficult and verbose at first which is what can skew your perception if you don’t actually commit to writing a lot of code and reading others’ code so that you become familiar with it better.

> Compared to most languages, actually [4]. Rust is similar to Java and Zig in this regard. Sure, we can argue the use case of Rust is different than eg. Python.

That these are the languages you’re comparing of is a point in Rust’s favor - it’s targeting a significantly lower level and higher performance of language. So Java is not comparable at all. Zig however nice is fundamentally not a safe language (more like C with fewer razor blades) and is inappropriate from that perspective. Like I said - it fits a completely different Pareto frontier - it’s strictly better than C/C++ on every front (even with the borrow checker it’s faster and less painful development) and people are considering it in the same breath as Go (also unsafe and not as fast), Java (safe but not as fast) and Python (very concise but super slow and code is often low quality historically).