On the contrary, the borrow checker is basically the first thing you learn about when writing in Rust as it's the primary "gimmick" of the language. Anyone writing a non-trivial program should have at least heard the term before, even if they don't fully understand how it works.

but I was so new to the game I didn't even know what those words meant

There's nothing wrong with being new to something. But you shouldn't be new to rust and releasing an app. Normally by the time you've written such an app you would be familiar with rust, but vibe coding allows you to bypass that wall

Bold of you to assume anyone is going to care enough to hire professionals to fix old software. They're just going to vibe code a new program with the new whizbang-5000 LLM.

Even if the pay is good - unfucking vibed code is going to be very grueling. Like fixing legacy code but so much worse - because legacy code at least used to make sense at some point in the past.

TBH I only occasionally do some C# and C++ for about 20 years in my spare time, but even if I were hypothetically qualified to fix the world i'm kind of just planning to sit back and watch all of the sloppers go bankrupt for ruining their companies.

The borrow checker is a feature of Rust's compiler which places strict constraints on ownership of data to guarantee memory safety. It adds a lot of friction to writing Rust code if you're not experienced with the language (or sometimes even if you are). OP refers to the "language restriction of Rust", seemingly talking about the borrow checker, but has never even heard of it. It's kind of like someone claiming they didn't vibecoded their C++ project but having no idea what the STL is.

The language restriction of not knowing the language.

That's not how any of this works, he's crazy.

MF thinks GitHub has “like and subscribe”.

Yeah, I think the flow was this,

1. Is this vibe coded?
2. Partially, because of some of the features of Rust.
3. Borrow checker?
4. (Humourous misunderstanding ensues.)

Basically asking if the thing that gave them trouble was the borrow checker.

Yes. Someone that knows just a little more of rust than you do would know what the borrow checker is.

It's the core feature of rust.

Like talking about java and not knowing what "inheritance" is.

EDIT: just so you understand how vibecoded that project is.

The dude says he vibecoded "some of it" because some rust features make it a hard language for him. The one feature he's talking about is the borrow checker.

It's like saying "man, sure is hot today". Someone says "yeah, this summer sure is hot" and the dude replied "yeah, summerians lived in a hot place too".

Very integral. When someone says they're "struggling with Rust", it's thanks to the borrow checker.

Rust's whole shtick is the way it manages memory, which is the rules enforced by the borrow checker.

Basically:

When you want to store values in variables in any programming language, the memory should be allocated when you need it and freed as soon as you don't anymore.

Traditionally there are two ways this is done:

1. You manage it completely yourself, which is "unsafe" as you can forget to free memory you no longer need. This is called leaking memory. Or "reference" the location of something you freed previously, thereby attempting to read data you may not have permission to read (the OS will usually prevent that and kill the program), or reading and using a value you didn't expect, causing undefined behavior and fun to deal with bugs.

2. The language, sometimes using a process which runs alongside your main program, manages memory. Which adds lots of overhead.

Rust has it's own way of doing this: It adds some rules on how you can pass around references and ownership and these rules are affected by whether you can or can't edit the referenced data. All just so the compiler knows the lifetime of the vars that hold that data and when it can free it (before the program is even compiled, so no overhead when the program is running). Not following the strict rules prevents your program from being compiled into an executable.

The compiler gives very helpful info, tips, and pointers™ though, Rust is also know for this.

I recommend you and everyone start here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

(there's even an interactive version with quizzes, etc)

If you want an idea: just yesterday libre office writer crashed on me like 7 times. Losing all unsaved progress each time.

If someone competent wrote a good OSS alternative I would download it in a heartbeat.

(Lack of any idea to program more than anything tbh)

Make a launcher. Apparently they are all the rage nowadays.

Is rust low level? Genuine question, not trying to start an argument. I guess I sort of view it as low level but with a high level compiler lmao.