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I have mixed feelings about this. It's an interesting experiment and I'm curious to see how it'll pan out, but most of the justification boils down to "C++ is e

by pkkm 4y ago

I have mixed feelings about this. It's an interesting experiment and I'm curious to see how it'll pan out, but most of the justification boils down to "C++ is established and boring, Rust is trendy". To me, this wouldn't be convincing enough to switch to a language that doesn't even have a spec and in which a lot of libraries depend on very recent versions of the compiler.

lordofgibbons 4y ago
For a free and opensource project, developer enjoyment and attractiveness to a wider audience of enthusiastic contributors is a very valid justification. They even address this at the begining of the post: >Nobody really likes C++ or CMake, and there's no clear path for getting off old toolchains. Every year the pain will get worse. >C++ is becoming a legacy language and finding contributors in the future will become difficult Dealing with a large C++ code bases and CMake build errors is about as fun as getting kicked in the head. If Fish was a business and their entire focus was the bottom line, then it'd be a different conversation.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Personally I've found trying to set up a dev environment for C/++ projects to be like pulling teeth. I don't want to spend all day tracking down what my distro calls a library package. I want to get stuck in to programming right away if I'm doing it in my own time for fun. Rust projects seem to always be extremely easy to compile, make use of common shared libraries, and shared patterns. Once you learn the language, you need to know little about the individual project like you do with C/++ projects.
  - edflsafoiewq 4y ago
    This is probably the biggest reason I write new stuff in Rust. It's not as much a problem for existing projects that have already set up all their build infra though. Well, that and you get stuff like fs::read(path) instead of always having to go find the ReadFile function from the last project you worked on like in C++ land.
- epage 4y ago
  >C++ is becoming a legacy language and finding contributors in the future will become difficult To add to this point, I used to work at a large-ish C++ shop and we were already having problems finding C++ developers years ago and I'm assuming its just getting worse.
  - scotty79 4y ago
    I worked at dev company that projects were outsourced to. I was waiting to be assigned to a project for few months. One day manager came to ask us if there's anyone that knows any C++. I can do C++ but I kept quiet. I was hired as a JS dev to have fun and I didn't want to be dealing with crappy C++ for the rest of my career at that company. Nobody out of 30 people or so admitted to knowing C++. It's highly unlikely that they all didn't know C++.
pxc 4y ago
Much of Fish's genius is in feeling great to use, right away. It's a lot of small stuff, and dissected into minutiae, you could argue about each that it's not really necessary, or that you could already get existing shells to do that. But when you add it all up, it makes Fish delightful in a way that no other shell quite is just yet. I'd say it looks like they want to bring some of the same philosophy to their own toolchain and source code. It's about making Fish more delightful, just for developers this time rather than just end users. I'm optimistic that the Fish maintainers will be right this time, too. And at the end of the day, hell— it's their project, it should stay fun for that. As long as they don't break my usage too badly, I prefer that they rewrite Fish in whatever way keeps its development joyful for them. (I trust them on this. It's a small team maintaining a project they clearly love, and I think they have the chops.)
- 9935c101ab17a66 4y ago
  I couldn’t have said it better myself — fish is truly a revelation. I moved from bash to fish maybe ten years ago, and the positive impact of fish has been enormous. The project contributors have made so many good design decisions, and as you posit, and it’s great example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. On a related note, I’ve been really happy with the project’s release / update cadence. It seems like every few months a new feature or refactor drops that makes my life easier. It’s just such a great tool, and such a well-governed project.
nine_k 4y ago
C++ is established to be painful. Even the best engineers, working on Chromium at Google, keep producing lots of bugs using C++, the majority of these being memory-related bugs. Maybe Rust is equally hard and slow to write, but at least the result generates fewer CVEs.

by pkkm 4y ago

lordofgibbons 4y ago

For a free and opensource project, developer enjoyment and attractiveness to a wider audience of enthusiastic contributors is a very valid justification. They even address this at the begining of the post: >Nobody really likes C++ or CMake, and there's no clear path for getting off old toolchains. Every year the pain will get worse. >C++ is becoming a legacy language and finding contributors in the future will become difficult Dealing with a large C++ code bases and CMake build errors is about as fun as getting kicked in the head. If Fish was a business and their entire focus was the bottom line, then it'd be a different conversation.

Gigachad 4y ago
Personally I've found trying to set up a dev environment for C/++ projects to be like pulling teeth. I don't want to spend all day tracking down what my distro calls a library package. I want to get stuck in to programming right away if I'm doing it in my own time for fun. Rust projects seem to always be extremely easy to compile, make use of common shared libraries, and shared patterns. Once you learn the language, you need to know little about the individual project like you do with C/++ projects.
- edflsafoiewq 4y ago
  This is probably the biggest reason I write new stuff in Rust. It's not as much a problem for existing projects that have already set up all their build infra though. Well, that and you get stuff like fs::read(path) instead of always having to go find the ReadFile function from the last project you worked on like in C++ land.
epage 4y ago
>C++ is becoming a legacy language and finding contributors in the future will become difficult To add to this point, I used to work at a large-ish C++ shop and we were already having problems finding C++ developers years ago and I'm assuming its just getting worse.
- scotty79 4y ago
  I worked at dev company that projects were outsourced to. I was waiting to be assigned to a project for few months. One day manager came to ask us if there's anyone that knows any C++. I can do C++ but I kept quiet. I was hired as a JS dev to have fun and I didn't want to be dealing with crappy C++ for the rest of my career at that company. Nobody out of 30 people or so admitted to knowing C++. It's highly unlikely that they all didn't know C++.

pxc 4y ago

Much of Fish's genius is in feeling great to use, right away. It's a lot of small stuff, and dissected into minutiae, you could argue about each that it's not really necessary, or that you could already get existing shells to do that. But when you add it all up, it makes Fish delightful in a way that no other shell quite is just yet. I'd say it looks like they want to bring some of the same philosophy to their own toolchain and source code. It's about making Fish more delightful, just for developers this time rather than just end users. I'm optimistic that the Fish maintainers will be right this time, too. And at the end of the day, hell— it's their project, it should stay fun for that. As long as they don't break my usage too badly, I prefer that they rewrite Fish in whatever way keeps its development joyful for them. (I trust them on this. It's a small team maintaining a project they clearly love, and I think they have the chops.)

9935c101ab17a66 4y ago
I couldn’t have said it better myself — fish is truly a revelation. I moved from bash to fish maybe ten years ago, and the positive impact of fish has been enormous. The project contributors have made so many good design decisions, and as you posit, and it’s great example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. On a related note, I’ve been really happy with the project’s release / update cadence. It seems like every few months a new feature or refactor drops that makes my life easier. It’s just such a great tool, and such a well-governed project.

nine_k 4y ago

C++ is established to be painful. Even the best engineers, working on Chromium at Google, keep producing lots of bugs using C++, the majority of these being memory-related bugs. Maybe Rust is equally hard and slow to write, but at least the result generates fewer CVEs.