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Someone else downthread: "young developers can pick up Rust quite fast, and that makes it vastly easier than trying to find talented C/C++ developers." I hope

Someone else downthread: "young developers can pick up Rust quite fast, and that makes it vastly easier than trying to find talented C/C++ developers." I hope so. I have a hypothesis that the big-O for language success is "How easily can new programmers learn it?" Nothing else matter. JavaScript was slow, but everyone learned it, so it got fast. Python still had bad tooling, but everyone learned it, so it got better. And C got popular in the first place cause it was easier than assembly. I wanna ask my managers if we could try hiring Rust devs. I don't like hiring people fresh out of college, but I can't manifest more money to hire experienced C++ devs. If the pool of good-enough-Rust devs is growing faster, and maybe already bigger than the good-enough-C++ pool, why am we interviewing people who don't even know what they don't know about C++?

bitL 4y ago
Dunno. Young devs can pick basic Rust constructs fast but when it comes to complicated stuff where performance is critical... There must be raw talent and lot of grind. IMO it's easier to write super complex stuff in C++ than in Rust as there are just too many cognitive things to keep in mind in Rust to even compile. C++ for talented folks makes life easier there. Like JavaScript, yet another language written for bad to average developers to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot.
- adamnemecek 4y ago
  The complicated stuff is only on compile time. Unlike C++ where the complicated stuff is metastasized between compile time and run time. Also the truly tricky things in Rust are relatively few and can be escaped with an unsafe.
- deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- crabbygrabby 4y ago
  Really interesting take, I've had the opposite experience. I've also seen very talented c++ devs screw things up in prod that rust doesn't even allow for. Really recommend taking it more seriously, it's fun once you get a handle on it. Also the tooling is really good now.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    C++ has grown several language tools to let you write reliable, safe code. ... But it can't shed the old stuff without breaking backwards compatibility, and that's what bites you. The fact that smart pointers exist now doesn't stop a developer from passing around non -const char* with no size specifier and calling that a "buffer," and because the language is so old and accreted most of its safety features later, the shortest way to express an idea tends to be the likeliest way to be subtly wrong. This is really just a problem that other languages don't have because they didn't have the same starting point.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      It can't shed the old stuff, but it is very, very suspicious -- smelly -- when any of it appears in new code.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        It's smelly if you have enough people on the team to know what new code versus old code smells like. If your developers are coming to the table with some C++ tutorial books written a decade ago, good luck. Invest in a decent linter and opinionated format checker.
    - _0w8t 4y ago
      The problem is that there is a lot of code and libraries using older patterns. And modern C++ is sufficiently different from the older C++ to constitute effectively a new language while still being unsafe. Moreover, in an attempt to address the efficiency the language has added views and ranges that provides more ways to corrupt memory. So why rewrite libraries in modern C++ when you can port them to Rust or Go and gain memory safety?
- thoweiruo23423 4y ago
  However, without a lot of experience, C++ code often turns out to be surprisingly slow.
- idontpost 4y ago
  > Like JavaScript, yet another language written for bad to average developers to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot. I can't imagine anyone ever describing vanilla JavaScript this way.
  - nrb 4y ago
    Yeah, made me reread the whole message with my sarcasm checker turned up. I can’t recall another widely used language of the era with as many foot-guns or one that went so long without a decent debugging experience. It really draws into question the claim that “it's easier to write super complex stuff in C++ than in Rust” when so clearly incorrect about JS. Especially when we have _decades_ of evidence from world-stopping vulnerabilities in the C/C++ ecosystem.
    - bitL 4y ago
      With JS I meant it was something to run in a browser, nothing serious (initially). So from the historic perspective it was correct as for the reason why it existed. It was not meant to write multithreaded system services where most bad/average devs struggle (and it's not multithreaded to this day outside webworkers).
    - girvo 4y ago
      > I can’t recall another widely used language of the era with as many foot-guns or one that went so long without a decent debugging experience. As someone who was writing both in the 2000s: PHP fits this "nicely" haha
  - throwaway0asd 4y ago
    I describe it that way. Like everything else in life the path to success is short if you don’t get distracted by unnecessary conventions and a series of bad decisions.
- Klonoar 4y ago
  >IMO it's easier to write super complex stuff in C++ than in Rust as there are just too many cognitive things to keep in mind in Rust to even compile. Surely you can describe this with more than a throwaway sentence, given that more and more people are seeming to experience the opposite. >Like JavaScript, yet another language written for bad to average developers to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot. Nobody would describe JS this way - the entire existence of that language is filled with projects attempting to make it better for "bad to average developers" because it is certainly not what you're describing. Edit: minor formatting of quotes.
- jackmott 4y ago
- josephg 4y ago
  > in Rust as there are just too many cognitive things to keep in mind in Rust to even compile. That hasn’t been my experience. Rust (the language) doesn’t seem to get any more complex as programs get bigger. Lifetimes, while complex in isolation, tend to compose really well. Most of the pain of learning rust seems to be experienced up front. (Well, other than async but I don’t consider that ready yet). In comparison, my experience of C++ was that it has way more “spooky action at a distance”. A bug in one part of the code will cause problems in another totally unrelated part of the code. I’ve had memory bugs in C++ which took weeks to track down. Maybe C++ has gotten better - I haven’t touched it in over a decade. I haven’t wanted to. And I can’t see many reasons I’d pick it up now that I know rust.
  - snovv_crash 4y ago
    If you didn't use C++ with the RAII paradigm, and had to write your own new/delete, your previous C++ experience isn't representative of the complexity of dealing with C++ since C++11. The new standards are a massive upgrade, and now a lot of other things are starting to get major quality of life improvements too (eg. template metaprogramming)
    - sophacles 4y ago
      This is a really good point. Just like the Great and Powerful oz telling us not to look behind the curtain or you'll see a goofy old man - C++ is quite mighty if you don't look over there at the other stuff.
      - snovv_crash 4y ago
        Rust only released 1.0 in 2015. If you want to complain about pre-C++11 features, I would like to complain about Rust's garbage collector.
        sophacles 4y ago
        Did rust have a GC at some point pre-1.0? Interesting. Not sure how limiting the discussion of a language to just the features included in the 3rd standard and forward makes sense. Particularly when the old stuff is still present and valid in the later standards. Just because you want to use some convention curtain off some area of the language doesn't mean it's not there.
- chocolatemario 4y ago
  When you say JavaScript, do you mean java? Rust undoubtedly raises the floor which is great, but designing scalable systems that enable new members to ramp up is a timeless skill independent of language. As someone who isn’t a rust native but an interested outsider, it can obviously be cumbersome to use on my pet projects compared to something like python, js, c# or C. Dealing with references to generically types traits adds a lot of syntactical burden (re: shit for me to type) and defining types and their implementations leaves something to be desired regarding its grammars. That being said, my toy programs do not require particularly complex types and the rust compiler is nothing short of a brilliant. The book is a surprisingly easy read, the module system is fine, cargo is decent out of the box, and there is an interesting mix of paradigms in the language itself. In my mind, the power of the compiler is certainly the big feature of rust and that compilers input language is decent enough such that I wouldn’t dislike using it as a daily driver.
- stormbrew 4y ago
  > IMO it's easier to write super complex stuff in C++ than in Rust as there are just too many cognitive things to keep in mind in Rust to even compile. It keeps you from compiling (many of) the bugs you'll happily write and deploy in C++. I don't think there's really much practical difference in "cognitive load" between modern C++ (which is painfully complex in ways that are largely not even useful) and rust. C++ just lets you pretend it's lower and you ship more bugs. Imo, writing rust is like the best parts of writing C++ with a stern but helpful assistant.
  - bitL 4y ago
    Sure, but don't forget the inherent trade-off - Rust allows you to write safer code at the cost of getting in the way. It simplifies some things and makes other things very complex. It empowers average devs that can suddenly write certain types of system services easily and be reasonably sure they work as intended, but it gets in the way of advanced devs writing core systems.
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      This sounds an awful lot like how everyone thinks they're an exceptional driver and everyone else is bad. Reality is no one's actually that great at piloting a ton of metal at speeds their brains can't keep up with in an uncontrolled environment. Anyways, unsafe exists so that if rust is genuinely in your way you can still do what you need to do.
      - bitL 4y ago
        Even C++ requires inline/linked assembler code in certain system cases to squeeze out maximum performance - why would you think Rust is an exception? It has nothing to do with elitism.
        stormbrew 4y ago
        If we're talking about raw performance then I'm baffled at what you're talking about to begin with. Rust can link with assembly just as well as c++ and I believe inline asm was stabilized a while ago. Otherwise it's llvm doing the heavy lifting on optimization so clang++ or rust is not much different. Other than the fact that rust can rely on much much stricter aliasing rules and do a bit better on some optimizations because of it. Usually when people talk about rust getting in their way they mean the borrow checker, which you can ask to get out of your way and it will still prevent bugs around the unsafe code. Bugs that "advanced programmers" are also prone to, especially around concurrency. The idea that some programmers are so good they don't make simple but consequential mistakes in code that deals in concurrency and memory management is absolutely elitism. There is no programmer on the planet who can't benefit from the borrow checker, and if there are any who will benefit less than they are "hindered" by it, there are almost certainly vanishingly few.
- Ar-Curunir 4y ago
  It's not easier to write "super complex stuff" in C++ than in Rust, precisely because C++ has much more cruft that the compiler can't check for you. And so what if Rust is lowering the bar for entry to systems programming? I'd much rather fresh ideas and fresh blood enter the field, than it slowly dying as the only people with arcane C/C++ knowledge slowly retire/die.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    There is still quite a lot that you can only ever express in C++. So, no. And plenty of that, you will never be able to express in Rust.
    - Ygg2 4y ago
      That's a bold claim (since both languages are Turing complete). I presume you meant safe Rust? But that's kinda the point. If something is memory tricky it is supposed to go into unsafe so you can make a safe abstraction around it. Unless you meant actually all of Rust. In that case, please share what's inexpressible in Rust.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        No. I mean that there is a great deal C++ can capture and present in a library that cannot be expressed in Rust. Much of this will never be in Rust because of this or that early choice of direction. At the most basic level, in Rust you cannot overload operators. You have no opportunity at all to code a move constructor. I could list off others all day long, but you probably would not understand most. Then there are the things the borrow checker will not let you do, that would be correct, but it can't see that. You might say you can put those in "unsafe", but you can't really field a library where users sometimes must put a call in unsafe. It is easy to insist you have never needed any of that stuff for your library, but that is really because you have constrained what you even think of trying to do by what you know you can do. We box ourselves in this way automatically, and it takes great effort to break out of such a mental box.
        4y ago
- howinteresting 4y ago
  In complex apps and services, Rust is generally faster than C++ because (especially over the long term, as there's churn in teams) C++ developers copy around stuff way more than necessary.
tdeck 4y ago
Are new devs less likely to screw things up in Rust? Probably. Is a modern Rust codebase easier to onboard with than a 40 year old monstrosity of a Microsoft C++ codebase? You bet! Are more people excited about learning Rust? Probably. Is rust much faster to learn than C++? Call me a skeptic. I've written Rust professionally and would rather write Rust than C++. That said, almost every concept you need to understand C++ is also needed to understand Rust, but then Rust adds additional complex semantics that aren't going to be intuitive to novices and don't trivially map to either other common high-level languages or obvious low-level concepts.
- jnwatson 4y ago
  You don’t have to know about exception safety, move semantics, meta-template higgery jiggery, or the 30 years of cruft that C++ has accumulated. Good riddance.
  - lenkite 4y ago
    You don't need to know about about 6 different string types, arcane borrow checker workarounds, RefCell complexity, massive async cruft - acquired by Rust in just 2 years. C++ will still be used heavily when Rust is buried 6 feet under and HN moves to the next hype language.
    - lmm 4y ago
      > You don't need to know about about 6 different string types If you're working on a substantial C++ codebase you probably do, actually.
      - snovv_crash 4y ago
        There are no 20 year old Rust codebase to compare with. C++ has gotten easier and cleaner on the last 20 years, whereas Rust has gotten more complicated. If we want to plot future trajectories...
        4y ago
quickthrower2 4y ago
Another option is get your existing devs to learn Rust. I think people would be more happy to do that than learn C/C++.
foomatic 4y ago
Why not just hire good people and ask them to learn C++. I mean how the heck did anyone actually pass this magic barrier of becoming a "C++ dev" in order to get hired as a C++ dev?
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I mean I could learn C++, but I don't wanna. I did some of it back in school (game development) and I don't particularly care for it. I don't want to do memory management myself or even have to worry about it.
- diego_moita 4y ago
  Because, little by little, C++ became "unlearnable". Long ago C++ made C a little bit more complex. Because there were already lots of C programmers that wasn't a big deal. But then it didn't stop. Little by little C++ grew into a monstrosity. A lot of people went along. I gave up. For new programmers to climb in 2-3 years a mountain that seasoned programmers took 15-20 years to climb is asking too much.
  - everyone 4y ago
    Just cus they add a feature to a language doesnt mean u have to use it. Though it does seem very few programmers are smart enough to stick to the most basic features whenever possible.
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      C++ the "language culture" unfortunately has a lot of gatekeeping as well. The fact that the gatekeeping generally revolves around "replace feature from n-5 years with the newer feature in the latest 0x00x release" is a bit tiresome. Yes, I'm exaggerating, a bit. As for the Microsoft whomever-he-is: I agree in theory, I disagree in practice. If there are a lot of C++ devs writing important code, then let them continue to do so in their prime language that they've invested decades of hard work keeping up with the feature treadmill. New devs? Only if you have to.
noobermin 4y ago
Ok, so I hate to be too direct but the rust enthusiasm always struck me as annoying like the meme about arch users telling everyone they use arch and so should you, but on that token, I always felt it strange given it's literally over something as mundane as a programming language choice. BUT, this as a reason seems to explain a lot more for why evangelists, particularly those in management type positions in large IT companies are pushing rust so much. Wanting to weaken the economic position of a certain type of developer makes a lot more sense.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  > Wanting to weaken the economic position of a certain type of developer makes a lot more sense. Just more anecdata, but this isn't true for my company. We're hiring for Rust because we're seeing more and more clients take memory safety seriously (and ask specifically about it as a design consideration). These things have a way of balancing themselves out: developers like Rust, so there will probably be an eventual "glut" of Rust programmers like there was for C++ programmers in the 1990s. But it's a multiparadigm language, so I don't expect there to be consistent wage deflation based on that (and especially not in systems, where finding competent engineers is a perennial problem).
  - snovv_crash 4y ago
    > we're seeing more and more clients take memory safety seriously Running your test suite with asan, msan, tsan isn't sufficient? From my experience you need to start doing really nasty things (which shouldn't pass code review) before the sanitizers won't find your issues.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      There are plenty of things that ASan won’t catch, like misuse between contiguous allocations. But that’s sort of tangential: the goal is to write software that’s correct to begin with, not poke holes in it with the testsuite after the fact. With Rust, I can pick third-party dependencies that I can be (vanishingly) confident don’t have memory safety issues; when I start a greenfield C++ project, any dependencies I bring in are now potential sources of memory unsafety in my code.
ransom1538 4y ago
You can find good C++ devs, if ySegmentation fault.
- deleted 4y ago
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bitwize 4y ago
Yep. C and C++ devs, Rust really isn't for you; it's for your replacement.
- lionkor 4y ago
  Ahhh, okay, good. Am in the process of learning it, but I think I'll stop and get ready to be replaced instead. After all, being in my 20's, ive become too old to "get it".

bitL 4y ago

Dunno. Young devs can pick basic Rust constructs fast but when it comes to complicated stuff where performance is critical... There must be raw talent and lot of grind. IMO it's easier to write super complex stuff in C++ than in Rust as there are just too many cognitive things to keep in mind in Rust to even compile. C++ for talented folks makes life easier there. Like JavaScript, yet another language written for bad to average developers to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot.

adamnemecek 4y ago
The complicated stuff is only on compile time. Unlike C++ where the complicated stuff is metastasized between compile time and run time. Also the truly tricky things in Rust are relatively few and can be escaped with an unsafe.
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deleted 4y ago
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crabbygrabby 4y ago
Really interesting take, I've had the opposite experience. I've also seen very talented c++ devs screw things up in prod that rust doesn't even allow for. Really recommend taking it more seriously, it's fun once you get a handle on it. Also the tooling is really good now.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  C++ has grown several language tools to let you write reliable, safe code. ... But it can't shed the old stuff without breaking backwards compatibility, and that's what bites you. The fact that smart pointers exist now doesn't stop a developer from passing around non -const char* with no size specifier and calling that a "buffer," and because the language is so old and accreted most of its safety features later, the shortest way to express an idea tends to be the likeliest way to be subtly wrong. This is really just a problem that other languages don't have because they didn't have the same starting point.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    It can't shed the old stuff, but it is very, very suspicious -- smelly -- when any of it appears in new code.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      It's smelly if you have enough people on the team to know what new code versus old code smells like. If your developers are coming to the table with some C++ tutorial books written a decade ago, good luck. Invest in a decent linter and opinionated format checker.
  - _0w8t 4y ago
    The problem is that there is a lot of code and libraries using older patterns. And modern C++ is sufficiently different from the older C++ to constitute effectively a new language while still being unsafe. Moreover, in an attempt to address the efficiency the language has added views and ranges that provides more ways to corrupt memory. So why rewrite libraries in modern C++ when you can port them to Rust or Go and gain memory safety?
thoweiruo23423 4y ago
However, without a lot of experience, C++ code often turns out to be surprisingly slow.
idontpost 4y ago
> Like JavaScript, yet another language written for bad to average developers to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot. I can't imagine anyone ever describing vanilla JavaScript this way.
- nrb 4y ago
  Yeah, made me reread the whole message with my sarcasm checker turned up. I can’t recall another widely used language of the era with as many foot-guns or one that went so long without a decent debugging experience. It really draws into question the claim that “it's easier to write super complex stuff in C++ than in Rust” when so clearly incorrect about JS. Especially when we have _decades_ of evidence from world-stopping vulnerabilities in the C/C++ ecosystem.
  - bitL 4y ago
    With JS I meant it was something to run in a browser, nothing serious (initially). So from the historic perspective it was correct as for the reason why it existed. It was not meant to write multithreaded system services where most bad/average devs struggle (and it's not multithreaded to this day outside webworkers).
  - girvo 4y ago
    > I can’t recall another widely used language of the era with as many foot-guns or one that went so long without a decent debugging experience. As someone who was writing both in the 2000s: PHP fits this "nicely" haha
- throwaway0asd 4y ago
  I describe it that way. Like everything else in life the path to success is short if you don’t get distracted by unnecessary conventions and a series of bad decisions.
Klonoar 4y ago
>IMO it's easier to write super complex stuff in C++ than in Rust as there are just too many cognitive things to keep in mind in Rust to even compile. Surely you can describe this with more than a throwaway sentence, given that more and more people are seeming to experience the opposite. >Like JavaScript, yet another language written for bad to average developers to keep them from shooting themselves in the foot. Nobody would describe JS this way - the entire existence of that language is filled with projects attempting to make it better for "bad to average developers" because it is certainly not what you're describing. Edit: minor formatting of quotes.
jackmott 4y ago
josephg 4y ago
> in Rust as there are just too many cognitive things to keep in mind in Rust to even compile. That hasn’t been my experience. Rust (the language) doesn’t seem to get any more complex as programs get bigger. Lifetimes, while complex in isolation, tend to compose really well. Most of the pain of learning rust seems to be experienced up front. (Well, other than async but I don’t consider that ready yet). In comparison, my experience of C++ was that it has way more “spooky action at a distance”. A bug in one part of the code will cause problems in another totally unrelated part of the code. I’ve had memory bugs in C++ which took weeks to track down. Maybe C++ has gotten better - I haven’t touched it in over a decade. I haven’t wanted to. And I can’t see many reasons I’d pick it up now that I know rust.
- snovv_crash 4y ago
  If you didn't use C++ with the RAII paradigm, and had to write your own new/delete, your previous C++ experience isn't representative of the complexity of dealing with C++ since C++11. The new standards are a massive upgrade, and now a lot of other things are starting to get major quality of life improvements too (eg. template metaprogramming)
  - sophacles 4y ago
    This is a really good point. Just like the Great and Powerful oz telling us not to look behind the curtain or you'll see a goofy old man - C++ is quite mighty if you don't look over there at the other stuff.
    - snovv_crash 4y ago
      Rust only released 1.0 in 2015. If you want to complain about pre-C++11 features, I would like to complain about Rust's garbage collector.
      - sophacles 4y ago
        Did rust have a GC at some point pre-1.0? Interesting. Not sure how limiting the discussion of a language to just the features included in the 3rd standard and forward makes sense. Particularly when the old stuff is still present and valid in the later standards. Just because you want to use some convention curtain off some area of the language doesn't mean it's not there.
chocolatemario 4y ago
When you say JavaScript, do you mean java? Rust undoubtedly raises the floor which is great, but designing scalable systems that enable new members to ramp up is a timeless skill independent of language. As someone who isn’t a rust native but an interested outsider, it can obviously be cumbersome to use on my pet projects compared to something like python, js, c# or C. Dealing with references to generically types traits adds a lot of syntactical burden (re: shit for me to type) and defining types and their implementations leaves something to be desired regarding its grammars. That being said, my toy programs do not require particularly complex types and the rust compiler is nothing short of a brilliant. The book is a surprisingly easy read, the module system is fine, cargo is decent out of the box, and there is an interesting mix of paradigms in the language itself. In my mind, the power of the compiler is certainly the big feature of rust and that compilers input language is decent enough such that I wouldn’t dislike using it as a daily driver.
stormbrew 4y ago
> IMO it's easier to write super complex stuff in C++ than in Rust as there are just too many cognitive things to keep in mind in Rust to even compile. It keeps you from compiling (many of) the bugs you'll happily write and deploy in C++. I don't think there's really much practical difference in "cognitive load" between modern C++ (which is painfully complex in ways that are largely not even useful) and rust. C++ just lets you pretend it's lower and you ship more bugs. Imo, writing rust is like the best parts of writing C++ with a stern but helpful assistant.
- bitL 4y ago
  Sure, but don't forget the inherent trade-off - Rust allows you to write safer code at the cost of getting in the way. It simplifies some things and makes other things very complex. It empowers average devs that can suddenly write certain types of system services easily and be reasonably sure they work as intended, but it gets in the way of advanced devs writing core systems.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    This sounds an awful lot like how everyone thinks they're an exceptional driver and everyone else is bad. Reality is no one's actually that great at piloting a ton of metal at speeds their brains can't keep up with in an uncontrolled environment. Anyways, unsafe exists so that if rust is genuinely in your way you can still do what you need to do.
    - bitL 4y ago
      Even C++ requires inline/linked assembler code in certain system cases to squeeze out maximum performance - why would you think Rust is an exception? It has nothing to do with elitism.
      - stormbrew 4y ago
        If we're talking about raw performance then I'm baffled at what you're talking about to begin with. Rust can link with assembly just as well as c++ and I believe inline asm was stabilized a while ago. Otherwise it's llvm doing the heavy lifting on optimization so clang++ or rust is not much different. Other than the fact that rust can rely on much much stricter aliasing rules and do a bit better on some optimizations because of it. Usually when people talk about rust getting in their way they mean the borrow checker, which you can ask to get out of your way and it will still prevent bugs around the unsafe code. Bugs that "advanced programmers" are also prone to, especially around concurrency. The idea that some programmers are so good they don't make simple but consequential mistakes in code that deals in concurrency and memory management is absolutely elitism. There is no programmer on the planet who can't benefit from the borrow checker, and if there are any who will benefit less than they are "hindered" by it, there are almost certainly vanishingly few.
Ar-Curunir 4y ago
It's not easier to write "super complex stuff" in C++ than in Rust, precisely because C++ has much more cruft that the compiler can't check for you. And so what if Rust is lowering the bar for entry to systems programming? I'd much rather fresh ideas and fresh blood enter the field, than it slowly dying as the only people with arcane C/C++ knowledge slowly retire/die.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  There is still quite a lot that you can only ever express in C++. So, no. And plenty of that, you will never be able to express in Rust.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    That's a bold claim (since both languages are Turing complete). I presume you meant safe Rust? But that's kinda the point. If something is memory tricky it is supposed to go into unsafe so you can make a safe abstraction around it. Unless you meant actually all of Rust. In that case, please share what's inexpressible in Rust.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      No. I mean that there is a great deal C++ can capture and present in a library that cannot be expressed in Rust. Much of this will never be in Rust because of this or that early choice of direction. At the most basic level, in Rust you cannot overload operators. You have no opportunity at all to code a move constructor. I could list off others all day long, but you probably would not understand most. Then there are the things the borrow checker will not let you do, that would be correct, but it can't see that. You might say you can put those in "unsafe", but you can't really field a library where users sometimes must put a call in unsafe. It is easy to insist you have never needed any of that stuff for your library, but that is really because you have constrained what you even think of trying to do by what you know you can do. We box ourselves in this way automatically, and it takes great effort to break out of such a mental box.
      - 4y ago
howinteresting 4y ago
In complex apps and services, Rust is generally faster than C++ because (especially over the long term, as there's churn in teams) C++ developers copy around stuff way more than necessary.

tdeck 4y ago

Are new devs less likely to screw things up in Rust? Probably. Is a modern Rust codebase easier to onboard with than a 40 year old monstrosity of a Microsoft C++ codebase? You bet! Are more people excited about learning Rust? Probably. Is rust much faster to learn than C++? Call me a skeptic. I've written Rust professionally and would rather write Rust than C++. That said, almost every concept you need to understand C++ is also needed to understand Rust, but then Rust adds additional complex semantics that aren't going to be intuitive to novices and don't trivially map to either other common high-level languages or obvious low-level concepts.

jnwatson 4y ago
You don’t have to know about exception safety, move semantics, meta-template higgery jiggery, or the 30 years of cruft that C++ has accumulated. Good riddance.
- lenkite 4y ago
  You don't need to know about about 6 different string types, arcane borrow checker workarounds, RefCell complexity, massive async cruft - acquired by Rust in just 2 years. C++ will still be used heavily when Rust is buried 6 feet under and HN moves to the next hype language.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > You don't need to know about about 6 different string types If you're working on a substantial C++ codebase you probably do, actually.
    - snovv_crash 4y ago
      There are no 20 year old Rust codebase to compare with. C++ has gotten easier and cleaner on the last 20 years, whereas Rust has gotten more complicated. If we want to plot future trajectories...
      - 4y ago

quickthrower2 4y ago

Another option is get your existing devs to learn Rust. I think people would be more happy to do that than learn C/C++.

foomatic 4y ago

Why not just hire good people and ask them to learn C++. I mean how the heck did anyone actually pass this magic barrier of becoming a "C++ dev" in order to get hired as a C++ dev?

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I mean I could learn C++, but I don't wanna. I did some of it back in school (game development) and I don't particularly care for it. I don't want to do memory management myself or even have to worry about it.
diego_moita 4y ago
Because, little by little, C++ became "unlearnable". Long ago C++ made C a little bit more complex. Because there were already lots of C programmers that wasn't a big deal. But then it didn't stop. Little by little C++ grew into a monstrosity. A lot of people went along. I gave up. For new programmers to climb in 2-3 years a mountain that seasoned programmers took 15-20 years to climb is asking too much.
- everyone 4y ago
  Just cus they add a feature to a language doesnt mean u have to use it. Though it does seem very few programmers are smart enough to stick to the most basic features whenever possible.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    C++ the "language culture" unfortunately has a lot of gatekeeping as well. The fact that the gatekeeping generally revolves around "replace feature from n-5 years with the newer feature in the latest 0x00x release" is a bit tiresome. Yes, I'm exaggerating, a bit. As for the Microsoft whomever-he-is: I agree in theory, I disagree in practice. If there are a lot of C++ devs writing important code, then let them continue to do so in their prime language that they've invested decades of hard work keeping up with the feature treadmill. New devs? Only if you have to.

noobermin 4y ago

Ok, so I hate to be too direct but the rust enthusiasm always struck me as annoying like the meme about arch users telling everyone they use arch and so should you, but on that token, I always felt it strange given it's literally over something as mundane as a programming language choice. BUT, this as a reason seems to explain a lot more for why evangelists, particularly those in management type positions in large IT companies are pushing rust so much. Wanting to weaken the economic position of a certain type of developer makes a lot more sense.

woodruffw 4y ago
> Wanting to weaken the economic position of a certain type of developer makes a lot more sense. Just more anecdata, but this isn't true for my company. We're hiring for Rust because we're seeing more and more clients take memory safety seriously (and ask specifically about it as a design consideration). These things have a way of balancing themselves out: developers like Rust, so there will probably be an eventual "glut" of Rust programmers like there was for C++ programmers in the 1990s. But it's a multiparadigm language, so I don't expect there to be consistent wage deflation based on that (and especially not in systems, where finding competent engineers is a perennial problem).
- snovv_crash 4y ago
  > we're seeing more and more clients take memory safety seriously Running your test suite with asan, msan, tsan isn't sufficient? From my experience you need to start doing really nasty things (which shouldn't pass code review) before the sanitizers won't find your issues.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    There are plenty of things that ASan won’t catch, like misuse between contiguous allocations. But that’s sort of tangential: the goal is to write software that’s correct to begin with, not poke holes in it with the testsuite after the fact. With Rust, I can pick third-party dependencies that I can be (vanishingly) confident don’t have memory safety issues; when I start a greenfield C++ project, any dependencies I bring in are now potential sources of memory unsafety in my code.

ransom1538 4y ago

You can find good C++ devs, if ySegmentation fault.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

bitwize 4y ago

Yep. C and C++ devs, Rust really isn't for you; it's for your replacement.

lionkor 4y ago
Ahhh, okay, good. Am in the process of learning it, but I think I'll stop and get ready to be replaced instead. After all, being in my 20's, ive become too old to "get it".