That said, personal experience has shown me that modeling data using types (instead of abusing, say, string-to-string dicts as is common in Python, or passing "untyped" strings around for things that /are/ strings but that have higher meaning, like file system paths) is very beneficial to program correctness. Obviously this is doable in many languages, but Rust helps enforce this due to the lack of implicit promotions and general adoption of these idioms in standard/common libraries.
As one specific example, I originally wrote sandboxfs (a FUSE file system) in Go and then rewrote it in Rust -- part because I hit performance issues, and part because I wanted to learn Rust. Trying to reproduce the original structure of the code in Rust was not doable, and having to adapt it to Rust highlighted various logic and concurrency bugs that existed in the Go version but that silently went unnoticed.
That's a good testimonial. Also thanks for the link.
I'm a big fan of strongly typed software, but at the same time I've absolutely seen bugs introduced where people were forced to be explicit in conversions and got it wrong, when the automatic thing would have been the right thing. Maybe the answer to my concern is just that there is no replacement for care and competence and that bad software can be written regardless of the tools.
That said, personal experience has shown me that modeling data using types (instead of abusing, say, string-to-string dicts as is common in Python, or passing "untyped" strings around for things that /are/ strings but that have higher meaning, like file system paths) is very beneficial to program correctness. Obviously this is doable in many languages, but Rust helps enforce this due to the lack of implicit promotions and general adoption of these idioms in standard/common libraries.
As one specific example, I originally wrote sandboxfs (a FUSE file system) in Go and then rewrote it in Rust -- part because I hit performance issues, and part because I wanted to learn Rust. Trying to reproduce the original structure of the code in Rust was not doable, and having to adapt it to Rust highlighted various logic and concurrency bugs that existed in the Go version but that silently went unnoticed.