4 ms·

You took my post as saying "all systems code should be written in C and that should always stay that way because people don't make mistakes". However, that is n

You took my post as saying "all systems code should be written in C and that should always stay that way because people don't make mistakes". However, that is not at all what I said (also see other replies). What I said was that one should not blindly make the opposite (false) reverse assumptions, which are that "code should not be written in C/C++ because they are 'unsafe'" or "all code written in 'safe' languages is 'safe'" (both for a hand-wavy definition of safe). The point that I tried to make was that if you do not have a good understanding of C++, you're probably not qualified to comment on the matter of some alternative being safer/better than it or not. And also that just blindly repeating other's opinions is not a path to understanding in this case. I realize that the linked article didn't say or do that, but my comment was clearly not directed at the author of the post, but at the community of this forum (just look around in this thread to find some of the group-think I'm referring to).

phaylon 9y ago
The big safety wins from Rust for me are things like the type system disallowing iterator invalidation, the type system handling resource releases, iterators making bounds checks a lot more affordable, the shared immutable/unique mutable distinction, the ability to encode that something can't keep a value somewhere accidentally, type system enforced thread safety, and others in that category. Why would I need a good understanding of C++ to consider these built-in facilities or the ones that just happen due to the type system as safer?
- ccommsxx 9y ago
  I don't think you need a good understanding of C++ to appreciate these features per-se. Only if you want to make a statement like "X is an improvement over C++ because of these". For example, enforced const-ness/immutability, option types and automatic ressource management (RAII) are also already standard in modern/best-practice C++ code. In general I agree that there are a lot of nice languages features that rust currently has which would also be nice to have in the c-family languages.
  - phaylon 9y ago
    > I don't think you need a good understanding of C++ to appreciate these features per-se. Only if you want to make a statement like "X is an improvement over C++ because of these". What about "X encoding thread-safety through the type-system is an improvement over the C++ way" and similar? This is how I usually read these kinds of statements.

phaylon 9y ago

The big safety wins from Rust for me are things like the type system disallowing iterator invalidation, the type system handling resource releases, iterators making bounds checks a lot more affordable, the shared immutable/unique mutable distinction, the ability to encode that something can't keep a value somewhere accidentally, type system enforced thread safety, and others in that category. Why would I need a good understanding of C++ to consider these built-in facilities or the ones that just happen due to the type system as safer?

ccommsxx 9y ago
I don't think you need a good understanding of C++ to appreciate these features per-se. Only if you want to make a statement like "X is an improvement over C++ because of these". For example, enforced const-ness/immutability, option types and automatic ressource management (RAII) are also already standard in modern/best-practice C++ code. In general I agree that there are a lot of nice languages features that rust currently has which would also be nice to have in the c-family languages.
- phaylon 9y ago
  > I don't think you need a good understanding of C++ to appreciate these features per-se. Only if you want to make a statement like "X is an improvement over C++ because of these". What about "X encoding thread-safety through the type-system is an improvement over the C++ way" and similar? This is how I usually read these kinds of statements.