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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++

#621

Post by notacoward »

lmm wrote: post #286
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 peo…

Most of those applications would probably be just fine with a GC language, so the cognitive load of doing things safely in any non-GC language is probably a waste.

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

#622

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

scoutt wrote: post #612
zibby8 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Visual Studio need to support Rust when VS Code has amazing Rust support?

Never underestimate the power of creating UIs with a drag and drop editor. Command line tools for general users ended in the 80’s. As far as I know, creating and dealing with UIs in Rust is a pain. I’m waiting for MS Visual Rust.

>> I’m waiting for MS Visual Rust.

My thoughts exactly.

Officially supported tools and SDKs are required in some industries. MS Visual Rust would be awesome!

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

#623

Post by clarge1120 »

According to Joel Spolski, of Microsoft Excel fame, he left Microsoft because of the company’s policy of encouraging the developer community to waste time and energy chasing new software technologies rather than shipping great software.

In other words, Msft has a long history of suppressing competition by steering the industry away from doing things that could threaten Msft’s dominance: like moving your company from the C++ language you’ve mastered to a new modern language you don’t know well.

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

#624

Post by sylware »

School-Cotton wrote: post #617
sylware wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was crates and modules, ok then it was weird namespace system. But I clearly remember "strings" being hardcoded in the syntax. So you mean rust has grotesque and absurd object orientation like c++ (or java)? Please, say no.

No, it doesn’t. Why don’t you take the time to read a Rust tutorial rather than just assuming everything bad you can imagine about it and asking people to correct you?

I was not keen on spending time reading rust syntax specs the moment you said rust is actually c++.

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

#625

Post by jjk166 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #609
_gabe_ wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programmers currently using Rust are superior to programmers using C++ > People learn C++ in college. People learn Rust because they love their craft Wow... and rust programmers wonder why rust has a stigma? So I guess John Carmack is inferior and is not an ultimate craftsman.

You cut out the words “statistically speaking”, which entirely change the meaning.

In what way does it change the meaning? As I read it, "statistically speaking" is just being used as a parenthetical phrase to qualify that they're not trying to argue literally every rust programmer is superior to literally every c++ programmer, and can be safely omitted so long as no one tries to make some dumb argument like "well I've met one bad rust programmer before" or "so and so is a great programmer and they choose c++."

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

#626

Post by humanrebar »

pornel wrote: post #536
humanrebar wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that Rust has a whole other ecosystem is the main thing that gives me pause. For all their faults, C and C++ targets the ecosystem you have: gems, pip, Conan, Nix, ...doesn't matter. They don't expect you to port to a new ecosystem. They can contort to meet your needs. Herb Sutter's latest proposal and, to a slightly lesser degree, Carbon are more interesting in that respect.

C/C++ target a fragmented mess that's different on every platform and inconsistent across projects. Technically you can invoke rustc the same way you invoke cc, and craft makefiles and handle all your dependencies the old way, but it's so tedious and fragile compared to Cargo that nobody wants to.

It's also possible to have simple enough C and C++ packaging. A lot of the problem is just inertia and education. But a lot of the problem is also that C and C++ are designed (if only implicitly) to work in all kinds of contexts as a feature.

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

#628

Post by UncleMeat »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #182

I wish technical people would stop pretending that choice of programming language isn't just largely very much a personal choice and then occasionally based on whatever else the ecosystem has to offer. Yeah, most people doing scientific computing might use Python, but then you have whole groups of people who are used to something else and would plainly prefer not to use a language for completely personal reasons. Lik…

I believe that this is true in almost all situations. Using Java vs Scheme vs Python vs whatever is a personal choice that will likely have only modest impacts on the eventual quality of the system.

But the cost of unsafety in C++ is often a vuln. This makes it a meaningfully different choice.

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

#629

Post by scoutt »

pornel wrote: post #557
dynamite-ready wrote: post #418

I think this is a silly idea. There are still loads of questions surrounding Rust. Especially about it's practicality... There are articles denigrating the likes of the trait and async systems on HN almost every day. And even ignoring that argument, any language is viable, so long as it can be used to build what you want to build.

There's very little overlap between HN commenters lamenting about colors of async functions, and actual Rust programmers writing async software. Rust's crates.io has over 15000 packages using async. Cloudflare has just replaced their nginx with a Rust proxy that uses Rust's async. Apple has hired Rust programmers for their storage and networking teams. Rust has been out for 7 years now, and detractors on HN still tre…

But don’t you think if Rust meant to be so popular and successful wouldn’t be it already, in this time and age? Like other languages since 2000? (Rails, typescript comes to my mind)

Rust has given all its arguments. Has proven its goodness. What do you think it is stopping the world from adopting it?

Another year is passing. The biggest news is that it might be included in the kernel. But it just requires a bad Linus Torvalds morning to become “Rust, the language that wanted but couldn’t“.

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

#630

Post by School-Cotton »

sylware wrote: post #624
School-Cotton wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn’t. Why don’t you take the time to read a Rust tutorial rather than just assuming everything bad you can imagine about it and asking people to correct you?

I was not keen on spending time reading rust syntax specs the moment you said rust is actually c++.

When did I say rust is actually C++? I said its memory allocation model is the same: normally done in containers or smart pointers, but malloc and free are still available under the hood if you really need them.

Many other things about rust are extremely different from C++.

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