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Its a well know cliche at this point for pretty much every program to be rewritten in the "safe" language of Rust. But it makes sense for C++ be in there too, b

Its a well know cliche at this point for pretty much every program to be rewritten in the "safe" language of Rust. But it makes sense for C++ be in there too, before it was the Rust people wanting to rewrite everything, it was the C++ people wanting to rewrite everything.

pjmlp 5y ago
It has been like that since the 80's as UNIX was gaining market share, but as Rust is gaining ground on that effort, it is easy to shit on the effort. Yes, even with its C underpinnings, C++ is better than plain old C, provided the safer types for arrays, strings and RAII resource management are used. Hoare was already complaining about C on his 1980 Turing Award speech.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  Problem with C++ has never been that it's "bad" or whatever. I worked with people who did stuff all over the axis (back when I was doing C/C++, which is the interval of 13 to 20 years ago): from drivers to Windows 98/XP MFC GUI programs, and the complaint always was that hey, there is yet another C++ version that fixes old problems but offers no way to (semi-)automatically migrate the existing code to the newer and better/safer API. I ain't here to shit on C++; I've looked at v20 and I liked what I saw. But the problem remains: there are tens of millions of coding lines written in older style C++ that are never going to be rewritten in a more modern version of C++. We might as well just rewrite them in Rust, or, if a better systems language with the same (or better) guarantees emerges, rewrite them in that. I in particular don't think it has to be Rust at all costs; I just happen to think it's the best mix of a systems and application language with the borrow checker and (mostly) fearless concurrency -- at least as of today. --- A small aside: IMO many people deliberately don't draw a distinction between loud fanboys and people who legitimately and objectively evaluated Rust and found it a net win for their needs. In many HN discussions only the first group is mentioned, the second one almost never. That's definitely not a fair representation of the Rust community. All programming languages have loud obnoxious fanboy minorities and I don't understand why Rust is being shat on regularly (here on HN) for something that exists everywhere. I can only theorize many people got rubbed the wrong way at the start and then don't care to make an objective analysis afterwards.

pjmlp 5y ago

It has been like that since the 80's as UNIX was gaining market share, but as Rust is gaining ground on that effort, it is easy to shit on the effort. Yes, even with its C underpinnings, C++ is better than plain old C, provided the safer types for arrays, strings and RAII resource management are used. Hoare was already complaining about C on his 1980 Turing Award speech.

pdimitar 5y ago
Problem with C++ has never been that it's "bad" or whatever. I worked with people who did stuff all over the axis (back when I was doing C/C++, which is the interval of 13 to 20 years ago): from drivers to Windows 98/XP MFC GUI programs, and the complaint always was that hey, there is yet another C++ version that fixes old problems but offers no way to (semi-)automatically migrate the existing code to the newer and better/safer API. I ain't here to shit on C++; I've looked at v20 and I liked what I saw. But the problem remains: there are tens of millions of coding lines written in older style C++ that are never going to be rewritten in a more modern version of C++. We might as well just rewrite them in Rust, or, if a better systems language with the same (or better) guarantees emerges, rewrite them in that. I in particular don't think it has to be Rust at all costs; I just happen to think it's the best mix of a systems and application language with the borrow checker and (mostly) fearless concurrency -- at least as of today. --- A small aside: IMO many people deliberately don't draw a distinction between loud fanboys and people who legitimately and objectively evaluated Rust and found it a net win for their needs. In many HN discussions only the first group is mentioned, the second one almost never. That's definitely not a fair representation of the Rust community. All programming languages have loud obnoxious fanboy minorities and I don't understand why Rust is being shat on regularly (here on HN) for something that exists everywhere. I can only theorize many people got rubbed the wrong way at the start and then don't care to make an objective analysis afterwards.