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Why Not Rewrite It in Rust? (2016)

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Re: Why Not Rewrite It in Rust? (2016)

#4

Post by seren »

Writing a few lines of "why not rewriting it in XXX" is more a sign of inexperience or immaturity in my humble opinion.

Maybe it is a good idea, but if you are going to propose to a dev team a massive rewrite that will take months or years, you should at least have the decency to analyze the code base, do a small POC, profile some part and point out where the improvement could happen. (And if you've discovered something that could be improved, you are more likely to convince people to rewrite only this part than everything)

Otherwise, it seems a bit cheap, and more something that someone repeats without necessarily understanding deeply because it is in the zeitgeist. It is probably also a bit of magical thinking, if we rewrite all our current problem will go away.

Re: Why Not Rewrite It in Rust? (2016)

#5

Post by Raveen87 »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #2

As a D user, I am looking at Rust with curiosity, but haven't yet seen any reasons that would make me switch.

I think Rust is such a well designed language. But as someone coming from more high-level languages I sometimes feel a bit lost due to not getting as much help from the IDE as I'm used to for C# in Visual Studio and Java in IntelliJ. For Rust I've only tried IntelliJ with the Rust plugin, which seems like the best choice for what I'm after.

Re: Why Not Rewrite It in Rust? (2016)

#6

Post by tlackemann »

I really enjoy articles like these. There is something special and provocative about a highly sarcastic article about programming, like a comedian that can make light of a serious topic. Maybe it doesn't solve anything but it does bring to light another view you might have not seen.

Unrelated but reading this reminded me of the classic article [Programming Sucks](https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks)

Re: Why Not Rewrite It in Rust? (2016)

#7

Post by asdkhadsj »

I know RIIR appears to offend a lot of C/C++ devs, and I understand why. I do however, think RIISSL (Rewrite It In Some Safe Language) is a real meaningful thing.

The reason Rust is the figure head for this is because I've not seen other languages with any amount of popularity take "safety" to the degree Rust has. I imagine there are others, I recently saw bounded array types in Ada and thought it was cool, but Rust definitely has the momentum.

This isn't to say that I'm justifying RIIR. I'm justifying RIISSL. To which currently, there aren't many.

In the future I hope to see many safe languages. I love Rust, but I'm super excited for the next language that blows Rust out of the water on safety and usability. I hope RIISSL is a thing in the future, and I hope there are more options so that Rust doesn't get so much unneeded hate over RIIR :)

I really do love Rust though.

edit: I should amend, RIISSL is only applicable where safety matters. I could definitely see arguments where all common unix tooling matters, as even find could have security implications. Yet, `find` compared to SSL implementations are vastly different for RIISSL.

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