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Comment by sirwhinesalot

3 years ago

The other commenters already mentioned it but Rust is an alternative to C++, with a similar approach to "zero-cost abstractions". Meaning it provides you with the means to do systems programming at a higher-level and ignore low level details.

If you're learning low-level/barebones hardware programming, this is both a blessing and a curse. If you already know the low-level stuff, then Rust/C++ abstractions let you organize your code in a much nicer way, but if you're learning the low-level stuff, then those abstractions are actually in the way.

C won't get in the way, for better or worse, so it's definitely worth learning, at least to appreciate the safety valves Rust and C++ give you after you've repeatedly shot your own foot (specially Rust which learned from most of the historic mistakes of C++).

If you don't want to deal with C-nonsense, then Zig is probably the best alternative for that sort of low-level programming, it even has freestanding (no operating system) as a first class target, stack-traces and all.

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sirwhinesalot

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Ar-Curunir  3 years ago

FWIW you can easily write Rust in a C-like style, using primarily free-standing functions and structs. You can opt-in to “advanced” features (traits, enums, generics) as you see fit.

Interfacing with other libraries, is ofc, a different matter, but you can usually wrap the library API in your own functions to minimize this mismatch.

  • tialaramex  3 years ago

    All of Rust's functions are available as "free-standing functions" because of how types work in Rust, and Rust doesn't have classes, just structs. So, as a consumer nothing changes.

       if std::collections::HashSet::is_empty(&basket) {

    ... is perfectly legal Rust, it would just be more idiomatic to write:

       if basket.is_empty() {

    The availability of all functions as "free functions" is convenient when you need, say, a filter predicate, since of course std::collections::HashSet::is_empty is exactly what you wanted if what you wanted to express was the predicate "is this HashSet empty?" and in languages that aren't allowed to do this you'd need to pointlessly shuffle chairs around to achieve the same thing instead.