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This sounds unnecessarily dismissive of C programmers. I see a lot of C programmers that shit on C++ but are intrigued by Rust, e.g. Linux kernel developers all

by eska 6y ago

This sounds unnecessarily dismissive of C programmers. I see a lot of C programmers that shit on C++ but are intrigued by Rust, e.g. Linux kernel developers allowing modules to be written in Rust.

neutronicus 6y ago
Yes, Rust is making a smart marketing decision by capitalizing on C programmers' antipathy towards C++ (and everyone else's). I don't know that this is, ipso facto, evidence of anything about C programmers other than that they really hate C++, though.
- eska 6y ago
  Your view sounds very jaded to me. Maybe Rust is liked more by C programmers because they prefer its approach, rather than C++'s? Calling it a marketing ploy seems without merit to me.
  - neutronicus 6y ago
    I'm a C++ developer who occasionally writes Rust. The experience of writing new code in one is very, very similar to the experience of writing new code in the other, right down to the compile times. The lifetime analysis in Rust is nice and pretty far ahead of what static analyzers can do in C++, but Rust Generics are a pretty weak approximation to Templates. Rust has better Browser integration, C++ has Qt. One imagines the languages will catch up to one another on these fronts. C++ has Inheritance, Rust settles for Interface Polymorphism (one can reasonably prefer either). The one really big difference here is actually cultural - the Rust community all agrees on Cargo, and it's a bit happier to compile the world and distribute static binaries, which removes massive headaches for both the developer and the end user while setting the language up for an eventual, Electron-style tragedy of the commons where a user is running like 8 Rust apps with their own copies of the same 14 libraries resident in memory (but that's a good problem to have because it means you've displaced C/C++ as the linguae francae of native app development). I guess the other really big difference is that there is no legacy Rust code. I like C++, but I can understand hating it. But if you have written new code in C++17, and hated it ... I suspect you are going to hate writing Rust too. And if you love Rust and hate C++ ... I suspect what you hate is legacy C++ from 2005. Finally, I was explicitly not concluding anything about C Programmers beyond that they hate C++.
    - qppo 6y ago
      I agree with most of what you're saying here except for the point on generics versus templates. I wouldn't say generics are an approximation of templates at all, templates are something in between generic programming and macros and that leads to them being hazardous, slow, and generally speaking unergonomic. Rust's generics allow for some seriously powerful abstractions to be built in a very clean and readable way, although there can be friction with stuff that would be simple with templates in C++ and quite verbose in Rust. Maybe concepts will change that.
      - adev_ 6y ago
        > I wouldn't say generics are an approximation of templates Template (at their origins) are nothing more than generics, and a pretty clean, powerful and zero cost way of doing generics. What you name "hazardous, unergonomic" macros style is not the template system itself. It is mainly due to all the 2005-styles SFINAE hacks that have been invented by abusing templates properties. SFINAE in C++ is nothing natural, it's at best a dangerous trick to have compile time resolution/execution. Fortunately all of that should die progressively with C++-17 constexpr for the good of humankind.
      - neutronicus 6y ago
        Non-type Template Parameters ("const Generics") are on the short-term road-map for Rust. Small step from there to recursion and compile-time factorial.
    - vvanders 6y ago
      As someone who built a career in C++ I like that Rust's generics are a poor approximation of templates(and that includes having worked with some of the modern C++ features). I have months of my life I've lost to the increased compile times from Boost on the applications I've worked on. C++ also makes it way too easy to reach for shared_ptr instead of unique_ptr leading to all sorts of unfortunate things. Rust makes that much harder and RefCell/Rc/Arc push towards design that are "single owner" which I've found scale out much better once you move into programs that are of a significant complexity. C++ still wins in portability on some platforms but I have a hard time picking it for anything greenfield at this point.

by eska 6y ago

This sounds unnecessarily dismissive of C programmers. I see a lot of C programmers that shit on C++ but are intrigued by Rust, e.g. Linux kernel developers allowing modules to be written in Rust.

neutronicus 6y ago

Yes, Rust is making a smart marketing decision by capitalizing on C programmers' antipathy towards C++ (and everyone else's). I don't know that this is, ipso facto, evidence of anything about C programmers other than that they really hate C++, though.

eska 6y ago
Your view sounds very jaded to me. Maybe Rust is liked more by C programmers because they prefer its approach, rather than C++'s? Calling it a marketing ploy seems without merit to me.
- neutronicus 6y ago
  I'm a C++ developer who occasionally writes Rust. The experience of writing new code in one is very, very similar to the experience of writing new code in the other, right down to the compile times. The lifetime analysis in Rust is nice and pretty far ahead of what static analyzers can do in C++, but Rust Generics are a pretty weak approximation to Templates. Rust has better Browser integration, C++ has Qt. One imagines the languages will catch up to one another on these fronts. C++ has Inheritance, Rust settles for Interface Polymorphism (one can reasonably prefer either). The one really big difference here is actually cultural - the Rust community all agrees on Cargo, and it's a bit happier to compile the world and distribute static binaries, which removes massive headaches for both the developer and the end user while setting the language up for an eventual, Electron-style tragedy of the commons where a user is running like 8 Rust apps with their own copies of the same 14 libraries resident in memory (but that's a good problem to have because it means you've displaced C/C++ as the linguae francae of native app development). I guess the other really big difference is that there is no legacy Rust code. I like C++, but I can understand hating it. But if you have written new code in C++17, and hated it ... I suspect you are going to hate writing Rust too. And if you love Rust and hate C++ ... I suspect what you hate is legacy C++ from 2005. Finally, I was explicitly not concluding anything about C Programmers beyond that they hate C++.
  - qppo 6y ago
    I agree with most of what you're saying here except for the point on generics versus templates. I wouldn't say generics are an approximation of templates at all, templates are something in between generic programming and macros and that leads to them being hazardous, slow, and generally speaking unergonomic. Rust's generics allow for some seriously powerful abstractions to be built in a very clean and readable way, although there can be friction with stuff that would be simple with templates in C++ and quite verbose in Rust. Maybe concepts will change that.
    - adev_ 6y ago
      > I wouldn't say generics are an approximation of templates Template (at their origins) are nothing more than generics, and a pretty clean, powerful and zero cost way of doing generics. What you name "hazardous, unergonomic" macros style is not the template system itself. It is mainly due to all the 2005-styles SFINAE hacks that have been invented by abusing templates properties. SFINAE in C++ is nothing natural, it's at best a dangerous trick to have compile time resolution/execution. Fortunately all of that should die progressively with C++-17 constexpr for the good of humankind.
    - neutronicus 6y ago
      Non-type Template Parameters ("const Generics") are on the short-term road-map for Rust. Small step from there to recursion and compile-time factorial.
  - vvanders 6y ago
    As someone who built a career in C++ I like that Rust's generics are a poor approximation of templates(and that includes having worked with some of the modern C++ features). I have months of my life I've lost to the increased compile times from Boost on the applications I've worked on. C++ also makes it way too easy to reach for shared_ptr instead of unique_ptr leading to all sorts of unfortunate things. Rust makes that much harder and RefCell/Rc/Arc push towards design that are "single owner" which I've found scale out much better once you move into programs that are of a significant complexity. C++ still wins in portability on some platforms but I have a hard time picking it for anything greenfield at this point.