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Most of the author's points here derive from the fact that C has been around for nearly 50 years and Rust a mere 8. This post should really be titled "Rust is n

Most of the author's points here derive from the fact that C has been around for nearly 50 years and Rust a mere 8. This post should really be titled "Rust is not a good C replacement _right now_". Yes, Rust still has a long way to go to be the right tool for all the things you can do with C today, but that doesn't make it less. It clearly has benefits when writing concurrent and safe code. You pay for this with a learning curve, but the Rust team has been shaving this curve down through better tooling and documentation for the past few years. > Yes, Rust is more safe. I don’t really care. In light of all of these problems, I’ll take my segfaults and buffer overflows. I suspect that for the author's work, these things may not matter much. But to a programmer working on any software where security is paramount (many web infrastructure pieces), this feature is golden. I expect that as Rust matures, we'll see a solidified spec, competing implementations, and expanded build tooling. C has a long head-start, not to acknowledge that is just wrong.

steveklabnik 8y ago
8 is even stretching it, May will be four years since things have actually been stable. Even that was the minimum we could provide guarantees for.
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Its not unreasonable to expect Rust to have looked at history, and improved upon it. To start out less than C means what? We don't want to wait 50 years for another language to 'mature'. Why can't it start out as good as, or even a step ahead of what came before? That may be the source of the disappointment surrounding deployment of Rust - why is it behind and not ahead of other tools?
- Sharlin 8y ago
  That doesn't make any sense. What do you mean "less than C"? Rust definitely looked at history and improved upon it, that's the whole point of the language! The author's gripe was that they feel Rust is evolving quickly much beyond C (like C++), not that it's trying to catch up on C. And do you really expect a language to just appear one day, fully grown, like Venus from a seashell?
- joshdover 8y ago
  The author's opinion of Rust being less is that, an opinion. It does have large advantages over C: memory safety, an incredibly powerful type system, a compiler that supports detailed error messages, a powerful build tool (Cargo), an expressive macro system, etc. Others who have built applications with Rust seem to be coming away with a much different impression that the author. He does mention some gaps (lack of a spec, unstable ABI) but these are not hardstops for all usecases. The main thread of complaints appear to be from lack of choice of tooling and compilers. I'd wager that the advantages outweigh the drawbacks for many projects, though not all.
z3phyr 8y ago
Rust is much more complex than C, it is not even in the same sphere of usage. A language like zig could be a decent C replacement.
skybrian 8y ago
On the other hand, Go has a very readable specification that was written early and is maintained to always be up to date. Why couldn't the Rust team maintain a spec and keep it up to date by changing it in the same pull request that changes a language feature in the compiler? This seems like mostly a matter of discipline.
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  > Why couldn't the Rust team maintain a spec and keep it up to date by changing it in the same pull request that changes a language feature in the compiler? This seems like mostly a matter of discipline. It's not that, it's that we take the idea of a spec very seriously. We want to have a spec that's extremely solid, and so there's a lot of foundational work that needs to be done first. That work has been ongoing. Not all specs are created equal, and good ones take a lot of time. For comparison, C was created in 1972, and the first specification happened in 1989.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    Okay, but this seems like letting the perfect get in the way of the good? A maintained, readable, informal spec should be quite useful as a starting point for writing a more formal spec later. It need not be definitive. It would be quite reasonable to point out areas that aren't nailed down yet - this is also useful for the reader.
    - steveklabnik 8y ago
      That's what the reference is, and it's there for exactly that purpose.
    - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
      What do you want out of an informal spec that isn't provided by "The Rust Reference"[1]? [1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/index.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/index.html
      - 8y ago

steveklabnik 8y ago

8 is even stretching it, May will be four years since things have actually been stable. Even that was the minimum we could provide guarantees for.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Its not unreasonable to expect Rust to have looked at history, and improved upon it. To start out less than C means what? We don't want to wait 50 years for another language to 'mature'. Why can't it start out as good as, or even a step ahead of what came before? That may be the source of the disappointment surrounding deployment of Rust - why is it behind and not ahead of other tools?

Sharlin 8y ago
That doesn't make any sense. What do you mean "less than C"? Rust definitely looked at history and improved upon it, that's the whole point of the language! The author's gripe was that they feel Rust is evolving quickly much beyond C (like C++), not that it's trying to catch up on C. And do you really expect a language to just appear one day, fully grown, like Venus from a seashell?
joshdover 8y ago
The author's opinion of Rust being less is that, an opinion. It does have large advantages over C: memory safety, an incredibly powerful type system, a compiler that supports detailed error messages, a powerful build tool (Cargo), an expressive macro system, etc. Others who have built applications with Rust seem to be coming away with a much different impression that the author. He does mention some gaps (lack of a spec, unstable ABI) but these are not hardstops for all usecases. The main thread of complaints appear to be from lack of choice of tooling and compilers. I'd wager that the advantages outweigh the drawbacks for many projects, though not all.

z3phyr 8y ago

Rust is much more complex than C, it is not even in the same sphere of usage. A language like zig could be a decent C replacement.

skybrian 8y ago

On the other hand, Go has a very readable specification that was written early and is maintained to always be up to date. Why couldn't the Rust team maintain a spec and keep it up to date by changing it in the same pull request that changes a language feature in the compiler? This seems like mostly a matter of discipline.

steveklabnik 8y ago
> Why couldn't the Rust team maintain a spec and keep it up to date by changing it in the same pull request that changes a language feature in the compiler? This seems like mostly a matter of discipline. It's not that, it's that we take the idea of a spec very seriously. We want to have a spec that's extremely solid, and so there's a lot of foundational work that needs to be done first. That work has been ongoing. Not all specs are created equal, and good ones take a lot of time. For comparison, C was created in 1972, and the first specification happened in 1989.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Okay, but this seems like letting the perfect get in the way of the good? A maintained, readable, informal spec should be quite useful as a starting point for writing a more formal spec later. It need not be definitive. It would be quite reasonable to point out areas that aren't nailed down yet - this is also useful for the reader.
  - steveklabnik 8y ago
    That's what the reference is, and it's there for exactly that purpose.
  - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
    What do you want out of an informal spec that isn't provided by "The Rust Reference"[1]? [1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/index.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/index.html
    - 8y ago