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Not a system programmer -- at this point, does C hold any significant advantage over Rust? Is it inevitable that everything written in C is going to be gradually converted to safer languages?
This title is moderately clickbait-y and comes with a subtle implication that Rust might be getting removed from the kernel. IMO it should be changed to "Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental"
Not a system programmer -- at this point, does C hold any significant advantage over Rust? Is it inevitable that everything written in C is going to be gradually converted to safer languages?
C currently remains the language of system ABIs, and there remains functionality that C can express that Rust cannot (principally bitfields). Furthermore, in terms of extensions to the language to support more obtuse architecture, Rust has made a couple of decisions that make it hard for some of those architectures to be supported well. For example, Rust has decided that the array index type, the object size type, an…
Bitfield packing rules get pretty wild. Sure the user facing API in the language is convenient, but the ABI it produces is terrible (particularly in evolution).
Not a system programmer -- at this point, does C hold any significant advantage over Rust? Is it inevitable that everything written in C is going to be gradually converted to safer languages?
Not a system programmer -- at this point, does C hold any significant advantage over Rust? Is it inevitable that everything written in C is going to be gradually converted to safer languages?
Obviously not. When will that happen? 15 years? Maybe it's generational: How long before developers 'born' into to memory-safe languages as serious choices will be substantially in charge of software development?
Not a system programmer -- at this point, does C hold any significant advantage over Rust? Is it inevitable that everything written in C is going to be gradually converted to safer languages?
C currently remains the language of system ABIs, and there remains functionality that C can express that Rust cannot (principally bitfields). Furthermore, in terms of extensions to the language to support more obtuse architecture, Rust has made a couple of decisions that make it hard for some of those architectures to be supported well. For example, Rust has decided that the array index type, the object size type, an…
This title is moderately clickbait-y and comes with a subtle implication that Rust might be getting removed from the kernel. IMO it should be changed to "Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental"
I absolutely understand the sentiment, but LWN is a second-to-none publication that on this rare occasion couldn't resist the joke, and also largely plays to an audience who will immediately understand that it's tongue-in-cheek. Speaking as a subscriber of about two decades who perhaps wouldn't have a career without the enormous amount of high-quality education provided by LWN content, or at least a far lesser one: L…
Not a system programmer -- at this point, does C hold any significant advantage over Rust? Is it inevitable that everything written in C is going to be gradually converted to safer languages?
Every system under the Sun has a C compiler. This isn't remotely true for Rust. Rust is more modern than C, but has it's own issues, among others very slow compilation times. My guess is that C will be around long after people will have moved on from Rust to another newfangled alternative.
That isn't always the case. Slow compilations are usually because of procedural macros and/or heavy use of generics. And even then compile times are often comparable to languages like typescript and scala.