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Ask HN: Will Rust be as popular as Go or C++?

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Re: Ask HN: Will Rust be as popular as Go or C++?

#11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obligatory quibble: Java and Lisp take care of memory safety issues, but not thread safety issues.

I'll quibble back several things: Clojure has immutability on top of atoms/refs/agents, so while Rust is doing Nerf mutation with the borrow-checker, Clojure avoids it in the first place. That, and generally I think threads are overused. Mostly because spawning a new process has been needlessly slow in the past (especially on Windows). Even in C-land, I've seen so many cases where forking and IPC would be more than f…

> And getting back to the hardware aspect, having a single thread and a badass SIMD instruction is usually faster and easier to reason about than multiple threads and general-purpose instructions where your performance gets fetch-execute-cache-hierarchy-memory-bandwidthed to death.

ripgrep benefits from both having multiple threads and badass SIMD instructions.

Re: Ask HN: Will Rust be as popular as Go or C++?

#13

I would like to be a believer in a "C replacement" which is safer, but I see people struggling to do simple things in Rust and am skeptical.

Definitely true. The "angel's advocate" way of putting it is that C lets you write code relatively quickly that appears to work but is actually undefined behavior in subtle cases that are difficult to test. Though for someone learning the language and mostly coding small examples, "correct in all cases" might not matter very much, and it can feel super frustrating.
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