Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust is a frustrating language for me too. I never saw the need for it, really. I just stuck with the language constructs in C++ that makes it basically impossible for memory leaks/use after free/use outside of bounds to occur or if they do occur, explode loudly in debug environments. I haven't used new/delete in a personal project in like a decade; longer than Rust has been around. Now I'm working on a project where…
What kind of solution would you propose to folks like your boss? One positive aspect I see about "rewrite it in Rust" is that you can to some degree expect a random Rust project to not leak and crash and expose vulnerabilities quite as much as a random C++ project. It's silly, but "written in Rust" acts somewhat as a badge of safety and performance, whereas "written in Java" and "written in C++" each only carry one o…
Regarding "rewrite in Rust", I believe that it's a smaller part of the appeal of Rust than it appears based on the amount of code actually written: the main excitement is from people who never really ventured from heap+gc languages into manual memory management but who love the idea of being able to write gc-less native code. And many of them would rather write it slowly, one borrow-check at a time, than with all the memory bugs they created dipping their feet in naive C/++. Those people rarely write much Rust, but their excitement infects some in malloc/free land and for them a rewrite is super attractive because it skips the entire explorative part of software development that is really not the strong point of Rust.
(yes, this is pure projection, not only was I describing what draws me to Rust, I also failed to pick up on the codebase of my previous boss, too much "how can we make this entire thing less slow and error prone" and too little "cram in requirement X, even if it might turn out to become requirement Z because it pushed the codebase over the edge to terminal unmaintainability")