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My experience is that languages survives not because of a particular feature, but because they are USEFUL in practice to produce a software. The fact that C is

My experience is that languages survives not because of a particular feature, but because they are USEFUL in practice to produce a software. The fact that C is used in so many places speaks for itself about it usefulness. And this is done by writing software by majority of C programmers instead of jumping on every forum to attack other languages, writing extended blog posts just to convince people that they "should" switch to the language they like. Also if you believe bounds check is the most difficult thing in software development, it just mean that you haven't dealt with a sufficient system yet or you just pretends to be. The similar thing also applied to that if you think naively putting pthread_mutex_lock and unlock around the data structure is hard, it just means you haven't touched the scenarios that C programmers resorts to non-trivial locking mechanisms for.

myrrlyn 6y ago
lol
BatmanAoD 6y ago
Nothing in this article seems to be saying that C "isn't useful". It also doesn't state that bounds checks are the "most difficult thing in software development." As the article mentions, C is 50 years old. The fact that it's still used is evidence of its usefulness, sure. It has outlasted almost all of its peers. Rust has been stable for under 6 years. In that time, it's been adopted by a slew of major companies, and people have used their free time to write some extremely good software in it. So by that metric, Rust's usefulness speaks for itself, too.
- up2isomorphism 6y ago
  The article is using one or two features in a quick marketing style to promote rust. - Regardless it is true or not, this seldom works in long term. I just simply point this observation out. In fact language as tool is never about more features, it is about minimum features for maximize utilities, and Rust is already on the domain of "feature-rich" language.

myrrlyn 6y ago

lol

BatmanAoD 6y ago

Nothing in this article seems to be saying that C "isn't useful". It also doesn't state that bounds checks are the "most difficult thing in software development." As the article mentions, C is 50 years old. The fact that it's still used is evidence of its usefulness, sure. It has outlasted almost all of its peers. Rust has been stable for under 6 years. In that time, it's been adopted by a slew of major companies, and people have used their free time to write some extremely good software in it. So by that metric, Rust's usefulness speaks for itself, too.

up2isomorphism 6y ago
The article is using one or two features in a quick marketing style to promote rust. - Regardless it is true or not, this seldom works in long term. I just simply point this observation out. In fact language as tool is never about more features, it is about minimum features for maximize utilities, and Rust is already on the domain of "feature-rich" language.