6 ms·

I'm not quite sure who this article is aimed at, and who those "C++ apologists" are, but as someone who programs in C++ all day, doesn't like it at all, and yet

by pron 5y ago

I'm not quite sure who this article is aimed at, and who those "C++ apologists" are, but as someone who programs in C++ all day, doesn't like it at all, and yet won't advocate to switch to Rust, these kinds of arguments are unconvincing. I'm not advocating to switch to Rust not because I don't think it's better than C++. I am absolutely, 100% convinced that Rust is technically better than C++ in most possible ways — in some, significantly better — and worse in almost no way. The problem is that, overall, it's not better enough. Reevaluating a low-level programming language is something that's done in a large organisation or project once every 15-25 years or so. Switching such a programming language incurs a high cost and a high risk, and is a long-term commitment. To make such a switch, the new language obviously has to be better, but that's not enough. It has to be a hell of a lot better (and, if not, at least return the investment with a profit quickly). For some, Rust is better enough. For me, not nearly so. Even though it offers a fascinating and, I think, ingenious path to better safety, it shares some of C++'s greatest downside for me, which is that they are both extremely complex languages. Maybe Rust is simpler, but not enough. Rust also shares what I think is C++'s original misguided sin, which is the attempt to create a low level language, whose code appears high-level on the page by means of a lot of implicitness. I've become convinced that that's a very, very bad idea. If there were no other ideas on the horizon or if Rust seemed like a surefire success, it might have been justified to make such a switch, but that's not the case. Rust's low adoption rate in professional settings is not reassuring to "PL-cautious" people like me, and a language like Zig shows that there are other approaches that appeal to me more, and while more revolutionary and ambitious than Rust in its departure from C++'s philosophy, I think it also has the potential to be better enough. Maybe it will make it, and maybe it inspires some other language that will, or maybe other ideas will turn up. Given the risk and commitment, to me it makes sense to wait. I don't like C++; I believe Rust is better. But that's not enough.

skyde 5y ago
do you think “C” share the same that same miss guided sin?
- pron 5y ago
  No, there is very little implicitness in C. However, C suffers from other serious problems that Rust and Zig do address (and C++, too, to a lesser degree). It is extremely unsafe (more so than C++), and has a lower abstraction ability even compared to those other low-level languages.
alexhutcheson 5y ago
> Rust is technically better than C++ in most possible ways — in some, significantly better — and worse in almost no way. It's much worse in one way: Interoperation with existing C++ code. Sure, that's not a fair criteria - C++ is designed in a way that makes it almost impossible for other languages to use C++ libraries without a heavyweight wrapper like SWIG. However, even though it's not fair, it's still really important. If you have a project like LLVM with millions of lines of existing C++ code, adding expensive or complicated interop boundaries between different components within your system is not an acceptable price to pay.
- pcwalton 5y ago
  Have you tried cxx? C++ interoperability in Rust has come a long way.
  - alexhutcheson 5y ago
    cxx is a huge improvement over manually writing bindings in C (with the inherent limitations imposed by C’s lack of expressiveness). At the same time, you still have to write a cxx::bridge to specify every boundary between Rust and C++ code, and the clients of on either side need to code against some generated code, not a simple .rs or .h file. It’s a huge improvement, but it’s still a lot more developer effort and boilerplate to use a C++ class from a Rust file than it would be to use that same C++ class from another C++ file. cxx also can only handle a subset of the interfaces expressive in C++. If you haven’t written the interface with the specific goal of making it usable via cxx, it’s pretty likely you’ll have issues wrapping it with cxx.
hutzlibu 5y ago
It is the first time, I have heard of zig and I have to say, it indeed does sound nice. (But I haven't done low level programming in quite some time ..) Can you maybe summarize a bit more, why you prefer it over rust? The concept of rust, of beeing safe by default and only optimize critical parts sounds solid to me, but after a quick skimming, I have not seen such a feature for zig, too, possibly by design? " No hidden control flow. No hidden memory allocations. No preprocessor, no macros."
- dralley 5y ago
  I'm not OP, but the typical answer is that the language is small enough to be understood by any engineer with a few weeks of training, and is pretty easy for anyone familiar with C to grasp the concepts of almost immediately. This is something that you definitely can't do with C++ and probably can't do with Rust. For some people it's more comforting to be able to understand the entirety of the language and focus on the complexities of the problem and the implementation than to have a slightly higher level and larger language taking over the details. It's the same reason people tend to like C over C++ or Go over other languages. This also generally translates into a couple of technical benefits as well, such as much much faster compilers relative to more complicated languages like C++ and Rust. Personally I still find Rust much more comfortable to write code in generally but I really appreciate the elegance of the Zig approach.
- pron 5y ago
  It's mostly a matter of personal taste and values. I am extremely averse to language complexity, I dislike implicitness in low-level languages, and I value fast turnaround times. Others may have different values. I think Rust and Zig might appeal to different people, so you should see if you like it for yourself (it takes 1-2 days to fully learn), but note that it is absolutely not production ready (certainly not for me). I just find its approach refreshing and even surprising, and more in the direction of what I would hope would become the future of low-level programming.
- flykespice 5y ago
  > No hidden control flow Oh boy and I was just reading (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30022022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30022022) about ISO C unsuitability for OS programming specially its implicit reordering of the control flow of the code, breaking parts that are sensitive to the machine code generated. I wonder if that point was introduce as a response for this ISO C nuance, does this means the machine code generated by ziglang code will be explicitly what each statement does?
flykespice 5y ago
Expecting a language be better "enough" is an unrealistic one, you will be waiting forever. Of course no language will be perfect to a specific domain, there is no objective metric every individual has their own needs and no universal language can cater all them at once, there will be trade offs. Rust is already better enough( and possibly will take decades before another language "suceeds" it), choose it or be on the perpetual expectation for a "perfect" language
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  > Expecting a language be better "enough" is an unrealistic one, you will be waiting forever. Disagree. I think the "market" (the set of programmers) defines "enough". When a language is enough better (in some area, doesn't have to be all areas) you see widespread adoption. C was enough better than PL/I, ALGOL, and assembly. Java was enough better than C++. (Why? Garbage collection, and the huge standard library.) So far, Rust is not enough better than C++. Now, I know this is kind of circular. I'm saying that a language is "enough" better if it wins in the market, and I'm saying that a language wins in the market if it's enough better. But I have some trust in programmers, that they are not just sheep. If a language is better than other languages in a way that matters to actual working programmers, a fair number of them will use it.
  - jbergens 5y ago
    I neither a c++ programmer nor a rust one but I read things about programming. My take is that rust is near the breaking point where it becomes so commonly used that more teams and organizations will just start to use it. The risk of switching for at least parts or a code base will seem low and then it probably looks better enough. Of course some organizations and code bases are harder to change for some reason or reasons but many will probably start the conversion in the next 5 years. Unless rust just stops growing or something truly better comes along. I personally don't expect something much better soon and I think rust will continue to grow in usage.
    - pron 5y ago
eklavya 5y ago
Every large project with years of code (legacy or well maintained) will be hardly ever re-written with complete success. It's not a property of programming language in my opinion. It's just economic sense. I doubt JDK will be rewritten in Rust/Zig, they did GraalVM in Java though. Zig might be revolutionary but personally for me Rust is why I can dare write non gc code. I never thought I would ever be robotically precise with memory management on a large project in memory unsafe languages, that doesn't change with Zig. There are experts in C/C++, there will be experts in Zig and we will continue having memory safety CVEs because they don't make mistakes/they can use some other static analysis tool/they can test :) I think people comfortable writing low level code under appreciate what Rust has done for bystanders or newcomers or a large team. It is definitely complex but choosing C/C++/Zig over it would make even less sense since lack of guardrails.
- pron 5y ago
  Even if you look just at sound language guarantees, Zig is closer to Rust in terms of memory safety than to C or C++. That it doesn't make all of Rust's static guarantees doesn't put it in the same bucket as languages that make none. Once you reduce memory safety issues to below half of their current rate, there are different paths to achieving a good overall correctness story.
  - pcwalton 5y ago
    Zig is no way closer to Rust than C or C++ in this regard. Zig is in fact not appreciably safer than C or C++. All of the same classes of memory safety problems that are present in C or C++ are present in Zig. I am extremely doubtful of the claim that Zig eliminates 50% or more of memory safety problems.
    - dralley 5y ago
      The language by itself, perhaps not, I don't know. But, the fact that it has a test framework built in, and the test allocator fails when it detects memory problems (like a built-in valgrind) definitely puts it far above C in terms of making it easy to write correct code.

by pron 5y ago

skyde 5y ago

do you think “C” share the same that same miss guided sin?

pron 5y ago
No, there is very little implicitness in C. However, C suffers from other serious problems that Rust and Zig do address (and C++, too, to a lesser degree). It is extremely unsafe (more so than C++), and has a lower abstraction ability even compared to those other low-level languages.

alexhutcheson 5y ago

> Rust is technically better than C++ in most possible ways — in some, significantly better — and worse in almost no way. It's much worse in one way: Interoperation with existing C++ code. Sure, that's not a fair criteria - C++ is designed in a way that makes it almost impossible for other languages to use C++ libraries without a heavyweight wrapper like SWIG. However, even though it's not fair, it's still really important. If you have a project like LLVM with millions of lines of existing C++ code, adding expensive or complicated interop boundaries between different components within your system is not an acceptable price to pay.

pcwalton 5y ago
Have you tried cxx? C++ interoperability in Rust has come a long way.
- alexhutcheson 5y ago
  cxx is a huge improvement over manually writing bindings in C (with the inherent limitations imposed by C’s lack of expressiveness). At the same time, you still have to write a cxx::bridge to specify every boundary between Rust and C++ code, and the clients of on either side need to code against some generated code, not a simple .rs or .h file. It’s a huge improvement, but it’s still a lot more developer effort and boilerplate to use a C++ class from a Rust file than it would be to use that same C++ class from another C++ file. cxx also can only handle a subset of the interfaces expressive in C++. If you haven’t written the interface with the specific goal of making it usable via cxx, it’s pretty likely you’ll have issues wrapping it with cxx.

hutzlibu 5y ago

It is the first time, I have heard of zig and I have to say, it indeed does sound nice. (But I haven't done low level programming in quite some time ..) Can you maybe summarize a bit more, why you prefer it over rust? The concept of rust, of beeing safe by default and only optimize critical parts sounds solid to me, but after a quick skimming, I have not seen such a feature for zig, too, possibly by design? " No hidden control flow. No hidden memory allocations. No preprocessor, no macros."

dralley 5y ago
I'm not OP, but the typical answer is that the language is small enough to be understood by any engineer with a few weeks of training, and is pretty easy for anyone familiar with C to grasp the concepts of almost immediately. This is something that you definitely can't do with C++ and probably can't do with Rust. For some people it's more comforting to be able to understand the entirety of the language and focus on the complexities of the problem and the implementation than to have a slightly higher level and larger language taking over the details. It's the same reason people tend to like C over C++ or Go over other languages. This also generally translates into a couple of technical benefits as well, such as much much faster compilers relative to more complicated languages like C++ and Rust. Personally I still find Rust much more comfortable to write code in generally but I really appreciate the elegance of the Zig approach.
pron 5y ago
It's mostly a matter of personal taste and values. I am extremely averse to language complexity, I dislike implicitness in low-level languages, and I value fast turnaround times. Others may have different values. I think Rust and Zig might appeal to different people, so you should see if you like it for yourself (it takes 1-2 days to fully learn), but note that it is absolutely not production ready (certainly not for me). I just find its approach refreshing and even surprising, and more in the direction of what I would hope would become the future of low-level programming.
flykespice 5y ago
> No hidden control flow Oh boy and I was just reading (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30022022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30022022) about ISO C unsuitability for OS programming specially its implicit reordering of the control flow of the code, breaking parts that are sensitive to the machine code generated. I wonder if that point was introduce as a response for this ISO C nuance, does this means the machine code generated by ziglang code will be explicitly what each statement does?

flykespice 5y ago

Expecting a language be better "enough" is an unrealistic one, you will be waiting forever. Of course no language will be perfect to a specific domain, there is no objective metric every individual has their own needs and no universal language can cater all them at once, there will be trade offs. Rust is already better enough( and possibly will take decades before another language "suceeds" it), choose it or be on the perpetual expectation for a "perfect" language

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
> Expecting a language be better "enough" is an unrealistic one, you will be waiting forever. Disagree. I think the "market" (the set of programmers) defines "enough". When a language is enough better (in some area, doesn't have to be all areas) you see widespread adoption. C was enough better than PL/I, ALGOL, and assembly. Java was enough better than C++. (Why? Garbage collection, and the huge standard library.) So far, Rust is not enough better than C++. Now, I know this is kind of circular. I'm saying that a language is "enough" better if it wins in the market, and I'm saying that a language wins in the market if it's enough better. But I have some trust in programmers, that they are not just sheep. If a language is better than other languages in a way that matters to actual working programmers, a fair number of them will use it.
- jbergens 5y ago
  I neither a c++ programmer nor a rust one but I read things about programming. My take is that rust is near the breaking point where it becomes so commonly used that more teams and organizations will just start to use it. The risk of switching for at least parts or a code base will seem low and then it probably looks better enough. Of course some organizations and code bases are harder to change for some reason or reasons but many will probably start the conversion in the next 5 years. Unless rust just stops growing or something truly better comes along. I personally don't expect something much better soon and I think rust will continue to grow in usage.
  - pron 5y ago

eklavya 5y ago

Every large project with years of code (legacy or well maintained) will be hardly ever re-written with complete success. It's not a property of programming language in my opinion. It's just economic sense. I doubt JDK will be rewritten in Rust/Zig, they did GraalVM in Java though. Zig might be revolutionary but personally for me Rust is why I can dare write non gc code. I never thought I would ever be robotically precise with memory management on a large project in memory unsafe languages, that doesn't change with Zig. There are experts in C/C++, there will be experts in Zig and we will continue having memory safety CVEs because they don't make mistakes/they can use some other static analysis tool/they can test :) I think people comfortable writing low level code under appreciate what Rust has done for bystanders or newcomers or a large team. It is definitely complex but choosing C/C++/Zig over it would make even less sense since lack of guardrails.

pron 5y ago
Even if you look just at sound language guarantees, Zig is closer to Rust in terms of memory safety than to C or C++. That it doesn't make all of Rust's static guarantees doesn't put it in the same bucket as languages that make none. Once you reduce memory safety issues to below half of their current rate, there are different paths to achieving a good overall correctness story.
- pcwalton 5y ago
  Zig is no way closer to Rust than C or C++ in this regard. Zig is in fact not appreciably safer than C or C++. All of the same classes of memory safety problems that are present in C or C++ are present in Zig. I am extremely doubtful of the claim that Zig eliminates 50% or more of memory safety problems.
  - dralley 5y ago
    The language by itself, perhaps not, I don't know. But, the fact that it has a test framework built in, and the test allocator fails when it detects memory problems (like a built-in valgrind) definitely puts it far above C in terms of making it easy to write correct code.