Comment by windward
4 days ago
ZSTs are a choice, if you're not benefiting from them in development time or correctness, why are you making that choice?
Rust isn't just C++ with static analysis. The safety is only about 1/3 of what makes me enjoy working with it. Even if I just consider the effort taken before I present something to a compiler, the trait system means I don't spend anywhere near as much time writing copy/copy assignment/move/move assignment constructors.
Some of that 2/3 will be me making choices like ZSTs, but I believe that's a result of it being necessary to grok the whole language and style and the idioms. If I just try to write C in Rust, it will be bad Rust and I'll have a bad time - but the same goes for just writing C++ as C with classes. I deliberately didn't say 'C/C++' in my ancestor post, because I think it's terminology that undermines claims of authority.
I do happen to have embedded experience, but avoid drawing conclusions from it because it is so different to more 'standard' systems development. If you can forgive a tangent: I avoid the whole domain now, because it feels like a ghetto. Standards are poor, tools are poor, pay is seriously poor. If you want to write embedded software, you probably have to work for a hardware company with hardware company's engineering culture and revenue model. That's a pretty crap place to write software in the west. I can't comment on comparing what like to do embedded development in Rust. Frankly, I hope I never can.
Good on you for recognizing what you enjoy and going for it.
I like hardware, always have :).
FWIW, I’ve done embedded at multiple mag 7 companies, and if levels.fyi is to be believed I’m getting paid the same as my peers doing other types of software. There are certainly places that don’t do this though (I hear the defense industry is notorious for this).
The point about the tooling being ghetto is spot on though, that’s part of why Rust is so exciting for us. A package manager?! What is this magic!!!