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It seems like many of the responses to this article are from Rust and other language fans (but mostly Rust). I think many people are reading what they want inst

It seems like many of the responses to this article are from Rust and other language fans (but mostly Rust). I think many people are reading what they want instead of what the author was trying to convey: "This is the most important and only real non-negotiable requirement for me; the reliability and portability of the toolchain and the access it provides to system and device interfaces." Rust isn't exactly reliable. Try to build Rust itself. There are all sorts of issues with resource consumption and parallelism, and it takes more CPU and memory than compiling an entire OS. Rust's portability is strongly discouraged by the resources it requires. Many platforms REQUIRE cross-compilation because they don't have enough memory, and this makes it hard to say it's easily portable. If you're a fan, you're easily going to overlook this. You probably don't care that more than half the world doesn't have computers which have the resources to run Rust. That's fine. You also say that people shouldn't be concerned with compiling their own stuff. That's fine, too. But there are people who like to create projects and write software that's as accessible as possible to most people, not just to some people and available to many others just as downloadable binaries. If you're not the kind of person who wants a free and open software ecosystem where everyone can participate, not just those with the resources to buy fancy, powerful, multigigabyte, multigigahertz, multicore 64 bit CPUs, then Rust is fine for you. If you you care about accessibility to as many people as possible, perhaps you'd come to the same conclusions as the author.

loup-vaillant 7y ago
It seems you are working on a different set of constraints than the author's. The author was talking about making games. Those are generally proprietary, and even the free one almost always have binary distributions. Rust itself likely have a binary package for your development platform of choice. Likewise, cross compilation is likely not a problem. You don't develop on the PS4 or Switch, you develop for them. Sure, in practice, cross compilation in C and C++ is indeed a problem. I'm wondering to this day how that's even a topic. A compiler is just a goddamn translator, the target platform should naturally be independent from the source platform. Worst case, you need to recompile the standard library for the new platform. (I suspect this is related to the bewildering difficulty of linking libc statically.) You do have a point, but it's much broader and much stronger than choosing C over Rust. We spend heaps and heaps of code solving problems that could be avoided in the first place. Niklaus Wirth's Oberon operating system required less than 10,000 lines of code, and now we need like 200 million lines?! No way we now have 20,000 times the functionality, so we can guess that current computing systems are at least 100 times too big (that is, comprised of over 99% accidental complexity, Brooks be damned). I sometimes feel the only way to make software truly Free and Accessible (meaning, people have the right and the means and the ability to use & modify their software), is to remake everything from scratch, with the benefit of hindsight.

loup-vaillant 7y ago

It seems you are working on a different set of constraints than the author's. The author was talking about making games. Those are generally proprietary, and even the free one almost always have binary distributions. Rust itself likely have a binary package for your development platform of choice. Likewise, cross compilation is likely not a problem. You don't develop on the PS4 or Switch, you develop for them. Sure, in practice, cross compilation in C and C++ is indeed a problem. I'm wondering to this day how that's even a topic. A compiler is just a goddamn translator, the target platform should naturally be independent from the source platform. Worst case, you need to recompile the standard library for the new platform. (I suspect this is related to the bewildering difficulty of linking libc statically.) You do have a point, but it's much broader and much stronger than choosing C over Rust. We spend heaps and heaps of code solving problems that could be avoided in the first place. Niklaus Wirth's Oberon operating system required less than 10,000 lines of code, and now we need like 200 million lines?! No way we now have 20,000 times the functionality, so we can guess that current computing systems are at least 100 times too big (that is, comprised of over 99% accidental complexity, Brooks be damned). I sometimes feel the only way to make software truly Free and Accessible (meaning, people have the right and the means and the ability to use & modify their software), is to remake everything from scratch, with the benefit of hindsight.