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I agree these planes are important and deserve care. At the same time pretty much all suggestions on how to meaningfully improve the safety of those planes boil

I agree these planes are important and deserve care. At the same time pretty much all suggestions on how to meaningfully improve the safety of those planes boil down to successor languages Cpp2, Carbon etc. or require some other complex manual rewrite of components of said plane. There is an argument to be made for having good out-of-the-box interoperability, however even in some of the most complex and important code-bases in existence, namely browsers Firefox and Chrome, have demonstrated that you can do that part replacement in Rust. I'm not saying there is no other way. But these suggested and yet unproven improvements to C++ will not automatically make those planes safer. They will require replacing parts with new code, and if we are writing new code there is a serious question we should ask ourselves, building on what foundation do we want to improve those "planes".

gavinray 3y ago
The second someone makes a successor language that seamlessly/directly interops with C++ _AND_ has the level of build/IDE tooling that C++/Rust have, I'm on board. The closest thing right now is Sean Baxter's "Circle" compiler in "Carbon" mode IMO: https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/README.md https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/... Unfortunately, Circle is closed-source and there's no LSP or other tooling to make the authoring experience nice.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  I also see Circle as the most promisor C++ wannabe, from all the contenders, and it being closed-source, once upon a time all major compilers were, so lets see.
pjmlp 3y ago
Rust in Firefox is a very tiny portion of it and now they are using some WASM sandbox tricks, because they aren't going to rewrite everything in Rust, given the effort. Chrome only now started to consider to allow adding Rust, and it is baby steps, not coming close to V8, graphics engine and such.
- Voultapher 3y ago
  "very tiny portion" that's a gross misrepresentation. Rust sits at ~10% and C++ at ~27% https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/ https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Since when is 10% big?

gavinray 3y ago

The second someone makes a successor language that seamlessly/directly interops with C++ _AND_ has the level of build/IDE tooling that C++/Rust have, I'm on board. The closest thing right now is Sean Baxter's "Circle" compiler in "Carbon" mode IMO: https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/README.md https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/... Unfortunately, Circle is closed-source and there's no LSP or other tooling to make the authoring experience nice.

pjmlp 3y ago
I also see Circle as the most promisor C++ wannabe, from all the contenders, and it being closed-source, once upon a time all major compilers were, so lets see.

pjmlp 3y ago

Rust in Firefox is a very tiny portion of it and now they are using some WASM sandbox tricks, because they aren't going to rewrite everything in Rust, given the effort. Chrome only now started to consider to allow adding Rust, and it is baby steps, not coming close to V8, graphics engine and such.

Voultapher 3y ago
"very tiny portion" that's a gross misrepresentation. Rust sits at ~10% and C++ at ~27% https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/ https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Since when is 10% big?