[questioner8216]

Good points. I have also heard others say the same in the past regarding Go. I know very little about Go or its language development, however.

I wonder if Go could easily add some features regarding that. There are different ways to go about it. 'final' in Java is different from 'const' in C++, for example, and Rust has borrow checking and 'const'. I think the language developers of the OCaml language has experimented with something inspired by Rust regarding concurrency.

[tialaramex]

Rust's `const` is an actual constant, like 4 + 1 is a constant, it's 5, it's never anything else, we don't need to store it anywhere - it's just 5. In C++ `const` is a type qualifier and that keyword stands for constant but really means immutable not constant.

This results in things like you can "cast away" C++ const and modify that variable anyway, whereas obviously we can't try to modify a constant because that's not what the word constant means.

In both languages 5 += 3 is nonsense, it can't mean anything to modify 5. But in Rust we can write `const FIVE: i32 = 5;` and now FIVE is also a constant and FIVE += 3 is also nonsense and won't compile. In contrast in C++ altering an immutable "const" variable you've named FIVE is merely forbidden, once we actually do this anyway it compiles and on many platforms now FIVE is eight...

[questioner8216]

Right, I forgot that 'const' in Rust is 'constexpr'/'consteval' in C++, while absence of 'mut' is probably closer to C++ 'const', my apologies.

C++ 'constexpr' and Rust 'const' is more about compile-time execution than marking something immutable.

In Rust, it is probably also possible to do a cast like &T to *mut T. Though that might require unsafe and might cause UB if not used properly. I recall some people hoping for better ergonomics when doing casting in unsafe Rust, since it might be easy to end up with UB.

Last I heard, C++ is better regarding 'constexpr' than Rust regarding 'const', and Zig is better than both on that subject.