3 ms·

Almost every project sees fewer issues with a rewrite, no matter which languages are involved.

thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
>> Almost every project sees fewer issues with a rewrite, no matter which languages are involved. That is provably false: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... There are numerous developers on this forum who could provide eyewitness accounts of project rewrite horror stories.
- akvadrako 4y ago
  That is about incomplete rewrites because the original is too complex to be understood in the given time. The same thing would happen if you rewrote in rust.
  - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
    You are correct that it is possible to have a rewrite go badly in any language. Rewriting a project in Rust can go badly depending on the circumstances. However, there are some patterns that Rust does not allow that other languages do allow which may help to avoid problems. For example, creating cyclic dependencies and relationships is more difficult in Rust due to the way that ownership rules are enforced. Rust also helps to avoid data races and memory unsafety issues so that whole classes of errors and bugs can be avoided.
- simplotek 4y ago
  > That is provably false: You're confusing things. Google's example focused on rewriting specific components with a specific goal in mind: fix/avoid unsafe memory access. The examples in that blog post consist of major rewrites of huge software projects like browsers, whose goal was to be feature complete. Those are quite different things.
  - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
    Yes. I conflated the project rewrites with component rewrites. The statement, "Almost every project sees fewer issues with a rewrite, no matter which languages are involved.", was too broad and I wanted to show how I disagreed with it when the article I cited was concerned with component rewrites. I did not intend to conflate the two since the scopes are quite different.
orf 4y ago
That is in no way true though. Rewrites often see more issues.

>> Almost every project sees fewer issues with a rewrite, no matter which languages are involved. That is provably false: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... There are numerous developers on this forum who could provide eyewitness accounts of project rewrite horror stories.

akvadrako 4y ago
That is about incomplete rewrites because the original is too complex to be understood in the given time. The same thing would happen if you rewrote in rust.
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
  You are correct that it is possible to have a rewrite go badly in any language. Rewriting a project in Rust can go badly depending on the circumstances. However, there are some patterns that Rust does not allow that other languages do allow which may help to avoid problems. For example, creating cyclic dependencies and relationships is more difficult in Rust due to the way that ownership rules are enforced. Rust also helps to avoid data races and memory unsafety issues so that whole classes of errors and bugs can be avoided.
simplotek 4y ago
> That is provably false: You're confusing things. Google's example focused on rewriting specific components with a specific goal in mind: fix/avoid unsafe memory access. The examples in that blog post consist of major rewrites of huge software projects like browsers, whose goal was to be feature complete. Those are quite different things.
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
  Yes. I conflated the project rewrites with component rewrites. The statement, "Almost every project sees fewer issues with a rewrite, no matter which languages are involved.", was too broad and I wanted to show how I disagreed with it when the article I cited was concerned with component rewrites. I did not intend to conflate the two since the scopes are quite different.

orf 4y ago

That is in no way true though. Rewrites often see more issues.