alt Hacker News> Rust is becoming less special in this area. Languages such as Dlang, Vlang, and Julia have added optional ownership and borrowing
Isn't the crux that Rust does those things without a garbage collector, that's the novel part? Someone correct me if I'm wrong (likely), but I think all those languages have garbage collectors, which Rust doesn't.
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> without a garbage collector, that's the novel part?
That's not quite how it works in various languages. You appear to be thinking of the garbage collector as something inseparable from the language.
Both Dlang and Vlang have optional garbage collectors, that can be turned off. In the case of Vlang, none of its libraries depend on the garbage collector. Vlang offers optional (flexible) memory management, somewhat similar to Nim (but they presently don't have optional ownership).
In the case of Julia and Vlang, their optional ownership is new and experimental. Dlang's optional ownership has been around for some years now, showing that it could be done.
Dlang and Vlang allow you to choose the type of memory management (along with some other languages) that you would like to use. Vlang does it by command line flags. You can turn off garbage collection and turn on ownership.
Yes, it's a critical distinction that's important in many systems domains, but getting some form of ownership policy and method - even if implemented with a GC I think is a step forward in terms of building reliable code.
The thing about it being optional in some languages is that it's an experiment, but one that as a feature it really pays off the more code in the ecosystem is compliant to ownership tracking. For rust, it's the vast majority of it (with opt out explicitly findable..) For languages offering it optionally, it's harder to assemble the full benefit.