So basically C/C++ will never die because of ubiquity.
It's like gasoline and oil. Both will always be the dominant energy paradigm because of ubiquity and because of habit.
Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)
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Re: Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)
#12Wow that's a long article, I tried summarizing the main points. I think some of them have merit, but for the "technical reasons", I don't think I agree on most. Here are the points: 1 - there's a ton of existing c++ programs 2 - other have tried replacing c++ and failed (D for instance) 3 - no one will use Rust until it has cool IDE stuff and production ready libraries: a chicken and egg problem that Go was able to s…
My biggest disagreement would be: The first 2 points are really bad arguments in my opinion, it's easy to see by imagining people saying this at the peak year of Fortran: "there's a ton of existing Fortran programs, other have tried to replace Fortran and failed" edit: (forgot to finish sentence) therefore, this new C language will never succeed 3 - I agree that community backing is very important, but in this case:…
Not disagreeing, more curious, but isn't Fortran still in relatively common use in Scientific computing? I haven't gotten into that domain, but I guess it is probably far below where it was at it's peak. Maybe it is just that we are getting lots of languages good for certain niches, instead of one general purpose language dominating multiple niches.
Re: Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)
#13The question about C++ vs Rust boils down, to me, when the game developers finally decide to switch. Game developers are not wedded to languages, if something is 25% more productive they WILL use it. If game developers flip, Rust is going to displace C++.
Embedded, unfortunately, is not a good canary. I still program all of my devices with C and not C++. C++ simply brings nothing to the table for the end user of an embedded device (<1M flash; <256K RAM). Development productivity on those platforms is gated by way more factors than choice of programming language.
Re: Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
My biggest disagreement would be: The first 2 points are really bad arguments in my opinion, it's easy to see by imagining people saying this at the peak year of Fortran: "there's a ton of existing Fortran programs, other have tried to replace Fortran and failed" edit: (forgot to finish sentence) therefore, this new C language will never succeed 3 - I agree that community backing is very important, but in this case:…
Not disagreeing, more curious, but isn't Fortran still in relatively common use in Scientific computing? I haven't gotten into that domain, but I guess it is probably far below where it was at it's peak. Maybe it is just that we are getting lots of languages good for certain niches, instead of one general purpose language dominating multiple niches.
Yeah, I'm not expert on Fortran use back in those time, it's just more used as an example of a language that at one point in time was much more popular than another.
For instance the amount of Fortran code and libraries in 1979 was probably order of magnitude bigger than the amount of C code. Was there more general purpose language that C was competing with back in the time?
I guess picking C as the old language and C++ as the new would have make the example clearer :)
But yeah I agree, and believe Fortran is still being used heavily in scientific computing!
Re: Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
My biggest disagreement would be: The first 2 points are really bad arguments in my opinion, it's easy to see by imagining people saying this at the peak year of Fortran: "there's a ton of existing Fortran programs, other have tried to replace Fortran and failed" edit: (forgot to finish sentence) therefore, this new C language will never succeed 3 - I agree that community backing is very important, but in this case:…
Not disagreeing, more curious, but isn't Fortran still in relatively common use in Scientific computing? I haven't gotten into that domain, but I guess it is probably far below where it was at it's peak. Maybe it is just that we are getting lots of languages good for certain niches, instead of one general purpose language dominating multiple niches.
It sure is. My colleagues in Mech E and atmospheric science all write fortran. I imagine this is common for technically proficient fields which aren’t computer science or engineering but still need efficient solutions, making starting from scratch in a more modern language prohibitively expensive.
Re: Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)
#16I'm reluctant to comment because the first iteration of this 'series' was fraught with blatant errors, from what I recall. > Rewriting it is way, way too expensive, risky, and, honestly, doesn't seem to make sense except in the heads of the most frantic Rust fans. I've met hundreds of rust developers at this point and at no point in conversation has anyone ever expressed that we should be working to rewrite every C++…
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Re: Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)
#17I'm reluctant to comment because the first iteration of this 'series' was fraught with blatant errors, from what I recall. > Rewriting it is way, way too expensive, risky, and, honestly, doesn't seem to make sense except in the heads of the most frantic Rust fans. I've met hundreds of rust developers at this point and at no point in conversation has anyone ever expressed that we should be working to rewrite every C++…
> There are a lot of really interesting reasons why Rust is slower in some benchmarks, like lack of constexpr or int generics, which at least one C++ benchmark uses heavily.
So the reason Rust is slow is because C++ has features that allow programmers to write faster implementations of the same algorithms? I think that's the point he is making.
Re: Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)
#18The question about C++ vs Rust boils down, to me, when the game developers finally decide to switch. Game developers are not wedded to languages, if something is 25% more productive they WILL use it. If game developers flip, Rust is going to displace C++. Embedded, unfortunately, is not a good canary. I still program all of my devices with C and not C++. C++ simply brings nothing to the table for the end user of an e…
Well, it seems to me that a lot of developers that don’t really have a great in house engine aren’t super interested in starting one from scratch anymore unless they’re super constrained by what the current offerings are (UE4 or Unity or bitsquid or some open source alternatives). Almost all of those are going to box you into c++ with “scripting” coming from c#/lua/python/ or more c++. It seems hard to see how Rust makes a dent there significantly.
Re: Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)
#19Wow that's a long article, I tried summarizing the main points. I think some of them have merit, but for the "technical reasons", I don't think I agree on most. Here are the points: 1 - there's a ton of existing c++ programs 2 - other have tried replacing c++ and failed (D for instance) 3 - no one will use Rust until it has cool IDE stuff and production ready libraries: a chicken and egg problem that Go was able to s…
My biggest disagreement would be: The first 2 points are really bad arguments in my opinion, it's easy to see by imagining people saying this at the peak year of Fortran: "there's a ton of existing Fortran programs, other have tried to replace Fortran and failed" edit: (forgot to finish sentence) therefore, this new C language will never succeed 3 - I agree that community backing is very important, but in this case:…
>The first 2 points are really bad arguments in my opinion, it's easy to see by imagining people saying this at the peak year of Fortran: "there's a ton of existing Fortran programs, other have tried to replace Fortran and failed"
And they'd be right: At work, even our Android app written this year contains a huge amount of Fortran via scientific libraries.
Re: Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)
#20The question about C++ vs Rust boils down, to me, when the game developers finally decide to switch. Game developers are not wedded to languages, if something is 25% more productive they WILL use it. If game developers flip, Rust is going to displace C++. Embedded, unfortunately, is not a good canary. I still program all of my devices with C and not C++. C++ simply brings nothing to the table for the end user of an e…
> Game developers are not wedded to languages, if something is 25% more productive they WILL use it. If game developers flip, Rust is going to displace C++.
Actually game developers tend to only switch when forced to do so via the SDKs of the platforms they have to target for their business.
It was so during all the transitions that already took place.
Assembly -> C/Pascal/AMOS, C/Pascal/AMOS -> C/C++, C/C++ -> C++/C#/Blueprints/Swift/Objective-C/Java
So there is already an ongoing slow movement regarding D, C#, Rust and eventually Jai, but there needs to be a catalyst from a few well known names in the industry for it to take place, like all those before.