3 ms·

> The language and the ecosystem are big and complex, very comparable to the complexity of C++. It’s in a different difficulty league compared to C... I think

> The language and the ecosystem are big and complex, very comparable to the complexity of C++. It’s in a different difficulty league compared to C... I think this is only true if you're already familiar with C-family languages (C and C++). As someone who came to lower-level programming with a JavaScript/Python/PHP background, I found Rust significantly easier to learn than either C or C++ (C was easy to do hello world, but jumped to WTF-level complexity as soon as I needed to interact with a 3-party library). Let me put it this way: would you trust a developer who was new to C or C++ to write secure code that's free of memory safety issues, undefined behaviour and multi-threading race conditions? You can do that with Rust, and IMO that's a huge win.

pjmlp 5y ago
Provided they never use unsafe blocks and the third party dependencies have been inspected for code safety invariants when called from safe code with bad parameters.
oconnor663 5y ago
> I think this is only true if you're already familiar with C-family languages (C and C++). This comes up a lot. A lot of people learn C or C++ in school, so the distinction between learning those languages and learning programming in general gets blurry. Being full of UB that "works on my box" also makes things blurry: If you don't know how to write sound programs, have you actually "learned" the language? I think learning C or C++ takes 2-5 years. Many people forget that, because it was mixed in with learning other things. Many others quit the learning process partway through without realizing it. Rust forces you to actually learn Rust to write Rust, which can make it seem like there's more to learn by comparison. But if you restrict yourself to the safe subset, I think there's actually much less to learn.
blub 5y ago
C++ and Rust are very deep multi-paradigm languages, with many features that try to cover a lot of domains - that’s why they are complicated. Sure, C++ has the decades of backwards compatibility and weaker memory safety, but in the end it’s clear they belong to the same difficulty class, even if C++ is likely harder to learn.

pjmlp 5y ago

Provided they never use unsafe blocks and the third party dependencies have been inspected for code safety invariants when called from safe code with bad parameters.

oconnor663 5y ago

> I think this is only true if you're already familiar with C-family languages (C and C++). This comes up a lot. A lot of people learn C or C++ in school, so the distinction between learning those languages and learning programming in general gets blurry. Being full of UB that "works on my box" also makes things blurry: If you don't know how to write sound programs, have you actually "learned" the language? I think learning C or C++ takes 2-5 years. Many people forget that, because it was mixed in with learning other things. Many others quit the learning process partway through without realizing it. Rust forces you to actually learn Rust to write Rust, which can make it seem like there's more to learn by comparison. But if you restrict yourself to the safe subset, I think there's actually much less to learn.

blub 5y ago

C++ and Rust are very deep multi-paradigm languages, with many features that try to cover a lot of domains - that’s why they are complicated. Sure, C++ has the decades of backwards compatibility and weaker memory safety, but in the end it’s clear they belong to the same difficulty class, even if C++ is likely harder to learn.