> but one reaps the benefits later thanks to more confidence when refactoring or adding code.

To be honest, I believe it makes refactoring/maintenance take longer. Sure, safer, but this is not a one-time only price.

E.g. you decide to optimize this part of the code and only return a reference or change the lifetime - this is an API-breaking change and you have to potentially recursively fix it. Meanwhile GC languages can mostly get away with a local-only change.

Don't get me wrong, in many cases this is more than worthwhile, but I would probably not choose rust for the n+1th backend crud app for this and similar reasons.

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zozbot234 5 days ago | parent [-]

The choice of whether to use GC is completely orthogonal to that of a type system. On the contrary, being pointed at all the places that need to be recursively fixed during a refactoring is a huge saving in time and effort.

	▲	gf000 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I was talking about a type system with affine types, as per the topic was Rust specifically. I compared it to a statically typed language with a GC - where the runtime takes care of a property that Rust has to do statically, requiring more complexity.