I'm not on the Rust bandwagon, but statements like this make absolutely no sense.
A lot of software was written in C and C++ because they were the only option for decades. If you couldn't afford garbage collection and needed direct control of the hardware there wasn't much of a choice. Had their been "safer" alternatives, it's possible those would have been used instead.
It's only been in the last few years we've seen languages emerge that could actually replace C/C++ with projects like Rust, Zig and Odin. I'm not saying they will, or they should, but just that we actually have alternatives now.
If you’re trying to demonstrate something about Rust by pointing out that someone chose C over Perl, I have to wonder how much you know about the positive characteristics of C. Let alone Rust.
Your comment comes across disingenuous to me.
Writing it in, for example, Java would have limited it to situations where you have the JVM available, which is a minuscule subset of the situations that curl is used in today, especially if we're not talking "curl, the CLI tool" but libcurl.
I have a feeling you know that already and mostly want to troll people.
And Golang is only 16 years old according to Wikipedia, by the way.
OS kernels? Everything from numpy to CUDA to NCCL is using C/C++ (doing all the behind the scene heavy lifting), never mind the classic systems software like web browsers, web servers, networking control plane (the list goes on).
Newer web servers have already moved away from C/C++.
Web browsers have been written in restricted subsets of C/C++ with significant additional tooling for decades at this point, and are already beginning to move to Rust.
I'm not on the Rust bandwagon, but statements like this make absolutely no sense.
A lot of software was written in C and C++ because they were the only option for decades. If you couldn't afford garbage collection and needed direct control of the hardware there wasn't much of a choice. Had their been "safer" alternatives, it's possible those would have been used instead.
It's only been in the last few years we've seen languages emerge that could actually replace C/C++ with projects like Rust, Zig and Odin. I'm not saying they will, or they should, but just that we actually have alternatives now.
At least on PC world you could be using Delphi, for example, or Turbo Pascal before it.
Also I would refrain me to list all other alternatives.
One could rewrite curl with Perl 30 years ago. Or with Java, Golang, Python, you name it. Yet it stays written with C even today.
If you’re trying to demonstrate something about Rust by pointing out that someone chose C over Perl, I have to wonder how much you know about the positive characteristics of C. Let alone Rust.
Your comment comes across disingenuous to me. Writing it in, for example, Java would have limited it to situations where you have the JVM available, which is a minuscule subset of the situations that curl is used in today, especially if we're not talking "curl, the CLI tool" but libcurl. I have a feeling you know that already and mostly want to troll people. And Golang is only 16 years old according to Wikipedia, by the way.
That's not true when the topic is operating system kernels.
OS kernels? Everything from numpy to CUDA to NCCL is using C/C++ (doing all the behind the scene heavy lifting), never mind the classic systems software like web browsers, web servers, networking control plane (the list goes on).
Newer web servers have already moved away from C/C++.
Web browsers have been written in restricted subsets of C/C++ with significant additional tooling for decades at this point, and are already beginning to move to Rust.
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Most software development these days is JS/Typescript slop, popular doesn't equal better
You can write slop in any language. And good software for that matter.
People didn't use seatbelts before seatbelts were invented.
And when they were mandated, it made a lot of people very angry!
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.3649589
Most of the world uses other languages because they’re easier, not because they’re safer.
They're easier because, amongst other improvements, they are safer.