If OP thinks Firefox is one of the largest C++ codebases in the world then OP has a very limited worldview.
Rust is not a good C replacement
21–30 of 213 posts
Re: Rust is not a good C replacement
#22Concurrency might be a dangerous thing but in microcontroller land, where I do my C programming, interrupts are a fact of life and just polling really isn't a practical solution.
Is that how Rust concurrency works under the hood? Polling?
The "fearless concurrency" advertised in Rust, which I believe the author is referring to, describes concurrent execution.
Re: Rust is not a good C replacement
#23Age of the langs absolutely needs to be taken into account if comparing stability and feature addition rate.
According to Wikipedia it's 47 years for C vs 8 years for Rust (as of 2019) - it's not that surprising that a 6x older language is much more stable.
Re: Rust is not a good C replacement
#24Most of the author's points here derive from the fact that C has been around for nearly 50 years and Rust a mere 8. This post should really be titled "Rust is not a good C replacement _right now_". Yes, Rust still has a long way to go to be the right tool for all the things you can do with C today, but that doesn't make it less. It clearly has benefits when writing concurrent and safe code. You pay for this with a le…
8 is even stretching it, May will be four years since things have actually been stable. Even that was the minimum we could provide guarantees for.
Re: Rust is not a good C replacement
#25OK looking Just at the number of features seems disingenuous. Cpp features tend to idk, increase the level of complexity as there tends to be quite a bit of friction between them. Rust features definitely “work together”. This post seems to have started with a conclusion and worked backwards. Rust is such a breath of fresh air. Cargo is nuts. The community is nuts. I’ve been writing rust full time for a couple of mon…
The main problem with C++ are not the new features, but the old obsolate ones. It's too late to fix the language.
Re: Rust is not a good C replacement
#26There's a lot of stuff I could say here, but I'll stick to > Attempts to integrate it with other build systems have been met with hostility from the Rust & Cargo teams. This is very much not true. We've put in a ton of work to support this. Arguably, we've put in too much design work and not enough implementation work; we've had a few different attempts at making this work even better than it does today, and we haven…
not a great article, but also not a great response
articles like what was posted are frustrating and can clearly hit a nerve, but instead of being defensive, try to use the feedback as indication that the work that's been done may just not be recognized, instead of it not being done
Re: Rust is not a good C replacement
#27Lack of a formal specification and/or an international standard is the real bummer. That's the biggest disadvantage in comparison to languages like Ada and C.
At this stage I'd settle for an informal language description, as long as it was a serious attempt to be basically complete and correct.
It's nearly four years since Rust 1.0 and the reference manual is still calling itself a best-effort document. It's surprising that a project which generally holds itself to high engineering standards is so sloppy in this one area.
Re: Rust is not a good C replacement
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. My comment was largely based on this discussion: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/2173 If you'd like to share a short summary of your thoughts, I'll update the article with your commentary.
I would suggest not taking comments on random github threads as the position of a completely different project.
I'm offering you an olive branch here. You can pile on the snark, or you can take my offer to issue a correction to my article.
Edit: found the hostility. Fine, I won't issue a correction. I didn't find Steve's arguments entirely correct and I was willing to add a note to the page letting him share his perspective so the reader could make up their mind. Now I'm less open to that.
Re: Rust is not a good C replacement
#29> Concurrency is generally a bad thing
Erm...
> Safety. Yes, Rust is more safe. I don’t really care. In light of all of these problems, I’ll take my segfaults and buffer overflows.
Ok this is nonsense.
Re: Rust is not a good C replacement
#30The main fallacy of this blog post is that he wants it to be one single programming language that replaces C.
C has actually been already replaced mostly. C++, Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Go, Rust, etc. have been chipping away for more than 20 years now at C's market share.
What kind of project can you seriously start today in C because there are no better options available?
My guess is embedded programming and kernel programming and for both of these usecases we feel the pain and would actually want something else.
> Yes, Rust is more safe. I don’t really care. In light of all of these problems, I’ll take my segfaults and buffer overflows.
Old C programmer yelling at clouds?
> Consider Go, which has had a lot of success in supplanting C for many problems. It does this by specializing on certain classes of programs and addressing them with the simplest solution possible. It hasn’t completely replaced C, but it has made a substantial dent in its problem space - more than I can really say for Rust
Go is IMHO a nice language and I would have been delighted to have it in the 90s. But nowadays it already feels outdated on arrival.
Lately I've been noticing more and more tools being developed with Rust. Some things take time, I wouldn't already write off Rust yet.