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It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++

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Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++

#281

Post by lenkite »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #237
sseagull wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give rust a few decades and it will get there. Remember when python was simple? And you just had setuptools? Popularity breeds complexity and fragmentation.

Sure. In the meantime that's a few decades of better developer experience.

More like a few decades of extreme churn. Hey dude are you using Crate #43? No, thats dead on github. Try Crate #999. No dude that uses a diff async runtime. Try Crate #888. No dude, that has protest-ware on it and the boss complained. Try Crate #888. No dude, that has incompatible dependencies. Try Crate #456. No dude, that lib causes "fearless concurrency" deadlocks with async. Try crate #999. No dude, that has a gazillion macros and compilation times approach the heat-death of the universe. Try Crate #666...and the story goes on.

Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++

#282

Post by dcow »

px43 wrote: post #206
a-dub wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

absolutely! came here to say just that. also the excellent book "windows internals", which is kind of like the bsd red book, or the magic garden svr4 book, but for systems derived from the windows nt kernel. but perhaps his best work is this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/blu... a screensaver that produces a realistic blue screen (kernel panic) for the version of the operating system and ke…

Also IMO it's best to avoid his fiction books, Zero Day etc. It's been about a decade since I read it, but it was the first book I've ever read where I felt uncomfortable with the level of detail the author went to when describing the breasts of every female character. The random awkward sex scenes thrown in for no reason was a weird choice. Most importantly, there's also a complete lack of understanding of the under…

Actually fascinating. I had no idea. I'm curious if I'll have the same opinion as you after giving this one a read.

Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++

#285

Post by lmm »

lenkite wrote: post #269
jnwatson wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to know about exception safety, move semantics, meta-template higgery jiggery, or the 30 years of cruft that C++ has accumulated. Good riddance.

You don't need to know about about 6 different string types, arcane borrow checker workarounds, RefCell complexity, massive async cruft - acquired by Rust in just 2 years. C++ will still be used heavily when Rust is buried 6 feet under and HN moves to the next hype language.

> You don't need to know about about 6 different string types

If you're working on a substantial C++ codebase you probably do, actually.

Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++

#286

Post by lmm »

ninefathom wrote: post #242

There are new programs being written daily in COBOL and Fortran, and I'm fairly certain that I see new PL/I floating around occasionally. C and C++ aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Love them, hate them, want to burn them with fire, they're here for a long, long time. Leaving that aside, I was still hitting Rust "oh look the developer of this crate on which the entire universe depends still assumes that everything…

> If Rusties want Rust to displace C... simplify your dependency chains. Get a build system that's easily workable without an Internet connection and recent TLS support. Make it easy for beginners to build out Rust infrastructure for OpenVMS on Itanium, Solaris on SPARC, z/OS, MorphOS, GNU/Hurd, and a 20-year-old budget PDA running a custom OS on an SH4 CPU.

C is welcome to that niche IMO. The priority is getting people to stop using C or C++ for regular applications that are exposed to the internet; if Rust can replace those use cases then it'll be job done.

Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++

#287

Post by jupp0r »

hgs3 wrote: post #211

I tried Rust about five years ago and I had trouble expressing cyclic data structures because there is no clear "owner" in a cyclic data structure. The "safe" solution recommended by the rustaceans was to use integers as references to the data in a vec or hashmap. I was rather put off by this: Instead of juggling pointers I was juggling integers. It made the code harder to debug and find logic errors. At least when I…

It's intentionally limiting. If you need an owner, create one (call it a graph struct that holds all you nodes for example). Make lifetime management an explicit and separate concern and unit test it independently. If this is too slow for your performance needs use a library that probably uses unsafe Rust to optimize the parts that matter and that offers safe abstractions for you to interact with. If there's none, roll your own. Be happy that not everybody is slinging dangling pointers all over the place in code where it's really unnecessary.

Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++

#288

Post by laserbeam »

hgs3 wrote: post #211

I tried Rust about five years ago and I had trouble expressing cyclic data structures because there is no clear "owner" in a cyclic data structure. The "safe" solution recommended by the rustaceans was to use integers as references to the data in a vec or hashmap. I was rather put off by this: Instead of juggling pointers I was juggling integers. It made the code harder to debug and find logic errors. At least when I…

Using integers instead of pointers is a cool optimization outside of Rust as well. It lets you serialize data easier (indices are the same when you load data on a different machine, pointers will change) and can use less memory (common choices: 8, 16 or 32 bits per int; 32 or 64 bits per pointer).

This is, however, an optimization. I rarely write my code like that on the first pass. It's something I always have in mind that at some point it's worth replacing the pointers.

(This is not specific to rust, or any other language)

Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++

#289

Post by WiSaGaN »

ninefathom wrote: post #242

There are new programs being written daily in COBOL and Fortran, and I'm fairly certain that I see new PL/I floating around occasionally. C and C++ aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Love them, hate them, want to burn them with fire, they're here for a long, long time. Leaving that aside, I was still hitting Rust "oh look the developer of this crate on which the entire universe depends still assumes that everything…

> Get a build system that's easily workable without an Internet connection and recent TLS support.

I'll say typing `cargo build --offline` can qualify as "easily workable".

Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++

#290

Post by [deleted] »

userbinator wrote: post #197
woodruffw wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm? I'm not a particular fan of Microsoft, but his stated opinion here is reflective of a broader trend in software design, one that's coming from both companies and the open source community. I don't see the brainwashing.

His "opinion" is not only reflective, but amplifying, and that's the scary part. The companies are the ones pushing this "security" stuff, because they want to stop us from doing things like jailbreaking --- and eventually running any software they don't approve of. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905587 He used to write very useful utilities which did things that Microsoft didn't officially support or oth…

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