Jamey Sharp On Whether You Should Translate Your Code To Rust

[pal666]

you should translate your code to rust if you are idiot

[pal666]

Rust???

It's 2017, why is anyone still wasting time talking about failed languages like Rust?

The only thing Rust succeeded at was becoming the new D. A niche and irrelevant language with a tiny group of deadenders spamming forums desperately trying to hype some magical bullet points that have no real world benefits.

C++ exploded in adoption and became the dominant systems and application programming language because the benefits over raw C code were immediate and obvious to any professional software engineer.

Rust utterly failed to make its case and instead

you surprised me by posting sane and factually correct comment. it misses ending, but still good
btw, becoming the new d is not that bad. d people are working on c++ standards committee and adding cool stuff from d to c++

[pal666]

In Rust : https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ffi.html
In C++ : http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/lan...nguage_linkage

your links show that for rust you have to write, debug and maintain wrappers, while for c++ you have to surround c header with extern "C" { }
i.e. "a lot of work" vs "trivial and already done"

Basically, the only thing that is compatible with C is C. Any language with more advanced features will have to make some compromises at some point to be able to be talked to by a C program.

it is true that c++ can't export its advanced features to c programs, but c++ can import lousy c features into c++ program. i.e. you could easily write c++ app with c libraries, or you could gradually add c++ code to legacy c app without crying for mature wrappers. because c++ is real language for real people and has backward compatibility (with old code, i.e. c). because nobody is going to rewrite their code for your new toy

[pal666]

But for languages that departs from the traditional way like pretty much all functional languages, like haskell and ocaml the number of projects stays rather small

functional languages have separate issue. you can't write many useful apps in purely functional way because real world is non-functional. and if you are ok with language which supports functional programming among other paradigms, you could just use c++

[pal666]

Rust might not have much following right now, but if Redox becomes sucessfull, i think it can really push Rust forward.

successful in what way? nobody is going to switch from linux to redox, so it looks like nothing can push rust forward

[pal666]

But there are many developers who do not want to program in C++ and are happy to see better languages coming.

those people will not use rust anyway. they will use php or javascript

[pal666]

It hasn't even been in release for two years

but it has been in development for more than ten years. in a world where new version of c++ is being released every 3 years

[andrei_me]

One of the issues of Rust, being a new/young language, is also one of it strong point, as they are open to additions/fixes to the core of the language and they release new versions of the language fast, if something is missing one can implement it

[mmstick]

Learning a new language is trivial for one person. Getting absolutely everyone to learn it isn't. You're always going to get people who code in C, have always coded in C and will only ever code in C. And node.js and the like might be cool and might have seen great uptake, but can you write the Linux kernel or Glibc in node.js? Node.js etc. might be great for some use cases, but when you're talking about the core components of GNU/Linux which is the bread and butter of FOSS you really need a compelling reason to move away from the tried and tested technologies.

Not our fault that you're too incompetent to pick up the skills to work in the best systems programming language to date.

As others have correctly pointed out, Rust is a fad. Redox OS is cool and I applaud the contributors. But I don't think you're going to see Binutils or something written in Rust.

Oops.... Rust implementations of Binutils tools are 10x faster than the GNU variants...

You might see some software rewritten in Rust as a proof-of-concept or a hobbyist side project, but you're not going to get anyone outside of Mozilla use it for anything serious.

Most of the organizations and companies using Rust are not related to Mozilla in any way, shape, or form. That includes the majority of contributors having zero relationship with Mozilla. There's already a long list of organizations that are using Rust for serious projects. I've ever heard from software engineers that write software for satellites that are considering picking up Rust for their next projects.

[mmstick]

Show me a serious distribution that uses that version of Coreutils written in Rust. Until you can I'd deem that a proof-of-concept or hobbyist pet project, you know, like I wrote in my post.

I use that version of core utilities, I also use exa as a replacement for ls, ripgreg as a replacement for grep (tears GNU grep to shreds in benchmarks), and my own parallel implementation of GNU Parallel in Rust under a MIT license, which is also significantly faster than the GNU variant.