Why is Rust supposed to be good?
It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++
391–400 of 929 posts
Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++
#392I 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…
Cyclical data structures are difficult to reason about, full stop - not only for the borrow checker.
Unsafe is there if you need it. It gives you C pointers for everyone and their debugger to blow up on. The difference is Rust makes you painfully aware that CS 101 is actually hardcore engineering.
Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are new devs less likely to screw things up in Rust? Probably. Is a modern Rust codebase easier to onboard with than a 40 year old monstrosity of a Microsoft C++ codebase? You bet! Are more people excited about learning Rust? Probably. Is rust much faster to learn than C++? Call me a skeptic. I've written Rust professionally and would rather write Rust than C++. That said, almost every concept you need to understand…
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.
I think you DO have to know about those, or close analogs, in writing Rust. I like both C++ and Rust but I will rise to defend C++.
1. Exception safety becomes "catch_unwind." You might object that nobody cares about that, but major C++ codebases (Google, LLVM, Mozilla) don't care about exceptions; they are built with -fno-exceptions.
2. Move semantics in C++ are annoying, and so is the borrow checker. In Rust you get hit by things like "this code is fine here, but you aren't allowed to refactor it into a function" because there's no interprocedrural visibility into struct fields.
3. Meta-template higgery-jiggery is real and bad in C++, but has a mirror in Rust. With C++ duck-typed generics you write dumb code that does the thing, and then you can refine it with hilariously awful techniques like SFINAE. In Rust you're googling higher-ranked trait bounds before you can even write the thing. What does `for` do again? I think "strongly-typed language, duck-typed generics" is a bit of a sweet spot and C++ has lucked its way into it.
4. "30 years of cruft" means things like "I speak C preprocessor" which is practical. C compat is why C++ is both so awkward and so successful. There's no smooth ramp from C++ to Rust, the way there was from C to C++; that's a choice and maybe the right choice but it has a price.
Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++
#394The Azure CTO knows as much about C++ as to easily confuse it with C. Anybody who say C/C++ is not aware that C++ is vastly different from C and it can't be combined into a single "language" like this. Mark Russinovich puts his ignorance on full display here.
Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because, little by little, C++ became "unlearnable". Long ago C++ made C a little bit more complex. Because there were already lots of C programmers that wasn't a big deal. But then it didn't stop. Little by little C++ grew into a monstrosity. A lot of people went along. I gave up. For new programmers to climb in 2-3 years a mountain that seasoned programmers took 15-20 years to climb is asking too much.
In what world is C++ harder to learn than Rust?
Rust exists in a way to point out that C++ is waaaaaaaayyyyyy harder than it looks.
Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++
#396I like memory safety as much as the next guy but an unelaborated opinion tweet is not hacker news.
Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++
#397There 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…
> 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 is x86 Anecdotally, I had the same issue recently with a C++ tool I wanted to tun on arm linux (forgot what it was; but it was a WASM tool. I ended up using a Rust alternative that was less mature, but did all I needed anyway) Lastly, the issue you're describing is mor…
"one would hope it has accumulated more DevOps wisdom over that period of time"
Yep. My thoughts exactly.
Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what world is C++ harder to learn than Rust?
Rust isn't actually that complicated and more importantly, most of it makes sense. I don't feel the same way about C++.
I feel that C++ makes sense.
It doesn't actually make for a good argument.
C++ makes more sense to me than Go or PHP. And probably Python.
Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++
#399Speaking of Microsoft, it's time to halt starting any new projects in Windows and use Linux for those scenarios where an OS kernel is required. For the sake of security and reliability. the industry should declare that OS as deprecated.
If only Linux offered a half decent kernel API instead of that dumpster fire that is POSIX. Even so, for anything not involving graphical user interfaces I somewhat agree with you.
Re: It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, so I hate to be too direct but the rust enthusiasm always struck me as annoying like the meme about arch users telling everyone they use arch and so should you, but on that token, I always felt it strange given it's literally over something as mundane as a programming language choice. BUT, this as a reason seems to explain a lot more for why evangelists, particularly those in management type positions in large IT…
No Rust Evangelist is out there thinking, "Hm, how do I put C/C++ developers out of business today"
I see you do not have much contact with Rust evangelists.