alt Hacker NewsAt its core, it takes the Modula-2 type system from 1978 and makes is appealing to C devs, with sprinkles of compile time programming on top, not as powerful as Lisp macros.
Much better than raw C, but still it leaves things to be desired in the context of safe systems programming.
Well, Rust makes one BIG bet, and then keeps adding everything else, just like C++ keeps doing.
The thing is: people don't want everything.
For the kind of things that are expected to be build in C and C-inspired languages it just doesn't make sense to have Lisp-like macros, or 2 flavours of macros like in Rust, or the accidental kind of metaprogramming C++ is famous for.
Comptime does the job just fine here, replacing the unpredictable macro mess.