3 ms·

More often than not, brand-spanking-new software is written against 30-year-old APIs. Lots of software we use day-to-day is old. For example, a couple years a

More often than not, brand-spanking-new software is written against 30-year-old APIs. Lots of software we use day-to-day is old. For example, a couple years ago I fixed a 20-year-old bug in netcat, which itself hadn't been updated since the mid 90s. After I fixed the bug, I didn't need to fish out an old compiler or any compatibility libraries; I just compiled it with the latest GCC and glibc, and carried on with my day. Don't get me wrong, I like Rust a lot and I'm excited that there's finally a real contender for the systems programming throne after all these years. I'm just less enthused about the prospect of refactoring my codebase once every few months to stay current. This is something that I think will level out with time, though. C itself was almost 20 years old before it was standardized, after all. I don't think it will take Rust that long, and I look forward to the day my copy of the Rust standard arrives on my doorstep.

naasking 10y ago
> More often than not, brand-spanking-new software is written against 30-year-old APIs. Let's assume this is true, brand-spanking new software will be written against 30 year old APIs that have survived 30 years of attacks and audits, but will avoid the ones that have proven vulnerable. > I'm just less enthused about the prospect of refactoring my codebase once every few months to stay current. The perception that you need to do this is false. You might feel pressured to refactor simply because of new syntactic improvements that make code clearer (like switching try!() macro to infix ?), but that pressure is a fiction. There's no real need to do it.
dikaiosune 10y ago
> After I fixed the bug, I didn't need to fish out an old compiler or any compatibility libraries; I just compiled it with the latest GCC and glibc, and carried on with my day. Could you show me an example where post-1.0 you wouldn't be able to do this with Rust?

naasking 10y ago

> More often than not, brand-spanking-new software is written against 30-year-old APIs. Let's assume this is true, brand-spanking new software will be written against 30 year old APIs that have survived 30 years of attacks and audits, but will avoid the ones that have proven vulnerable. > I'm just less enthused about the prospect of refactoring my codebase once every few months to stay current. The perception that you need to do this is false. You might feel pressured to refactor simply because of new syntactic improvements that make code clearer (like switching try!() macro to infix ?), but that pressure is a fiction. There's no real need to do it.

dikaiosune 10y ago

> After I fixed the bug, I didn't need to fish out an old compiler or any compatibility libraries; I just compiled it with the latest GCC and glibc, and carried on with my day. Could you show me an example where post-1.0 you wouldn't be able to do this with Rust?