Comment by gchamonlive

6 months ago

I personally have zero interest in these feud wars. I'm only glad there are more quality options for Devs to develop safer system tools.

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gchamonlive

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josephg  6 months ago

The only people I’ve met who seem to think it’s a feud war are a few dyed in the wool C++ fans who implicitly hate the idea of programming anything else. Rust is just a language. It has some strengths and weaknesses just like every programming language. Some of its strengths are incredibly compelling.

Personally I’m relieved that we’re starting to see real competition to the C & C++ duopoly. For awhile there all the new languages were GC, and paid for their shiny features with poor runtime performance. (Eg java, C#, Ruby, Python, lua, go, etc etc)

Rust is a fine language. Personally I can’t wait to see what comes after it. I’m sure there’s even better ways to implement some of rust’s features. I hope someone out there is clever enough to figure them out.

  • bgwalter  6 months ago

    [flagged]

    • josephg  6 months ago

      > That is a surprising opinion. Rust marketing is entirely based - like in this submission - on comparing its memory safety to C/C++ and saying that C is bad!

      I'm not really sure what you expect here. Like, a large driving factor of using rust (compared to C/C++) is that it has better memory safety. Should rust not talk about that? Should we try and be careful about the feelings of C/C++ devs and not name the truth in the room around memory safety?

      The reason android is moving to rust is because it decreases the memory related defect rate compared to C++. Should we shy away from talking about C++ memory bugs because they're somehow embarrassing?

      When C came out, I'm sure a lot was written about how much easier it was to program in compared to assembly. Does that mean there's a feud between C and assembly? I'm sure some assembly developers felt under attack. But its not a feud. Just two tools with different use cases. That's how I see C and rust.

    • aw1621107  6 months ago

      > Even in its own "memory safety" definition, which is the first result on Google, they criticize C instead of providing a proper definition:

      I'm not sure that page is intended to provide a definition of "memory safety" in the first place? It (and the following page) seem more intended to introduce safe/unsafe Rust and the boundaries between the two.

      It's also from the Rustinomicon, which states:

      > Unlike The Rust Programming Language, we will be assuming considerable prior knowledge. In particular, you should be comfortable with basic systems programming and Rust.

      So it's arguably unsurprising that a definition of memory safety would not be found there.

      My guess is that if you want a more precise definition you'd want to look at the Rust Reference (e.g., [0]) or in related areas.

      [0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/unsafety.html