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Comment by imiric

6 months ago

I think that it would be foolish for any software engineer to completely dismiss any technology. There is a time and place for any tool, and it is a job of a competent engineer to determine what the appropriate combination of these is that would solve a certain problem within specific constraints.

That said, memory safety is one criterion out of many that could be used to make that decision. For a large number of software projects, memory safety simply isn't a major concern. Ease of use, iteration speed, developer familiarity, availability of specific libraries, and so on, are often equal or greater concerns than memory safety.

So, sure, if you're writing a kernel, operating system, or a mission-critical piece of software, then Rust might be worth considering. Otherwise, you might be better served by other languages.

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imiric

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mx7zysuj4xew  6 months ago

I dont so much dismiss the technology as the people who insist on rewriting everything in rust.

Rust seems to attract a certain mindset of mediocre programmers who yell "security" to shove their poorly written slower code down our throats.

Most of them seem to be former web developers who bring all their npm drama to stable C foundations

  • pjmlp  6 months ago

    Stable where?

    We're in C23 nowadays, and in Linux distributions there are plenty of npm like drama, one apt/dnf install away with pkg-config, or vcpkg/conan for the more modern folks.

    Although I imagine there are a few still stuck in ./configure land.