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Extremely weird and ahistorical. I wouldn't go so far as to say that everyone should use rust, but this argument is against a straw-man. Roughly speaking, it sk

Extremely weird and ahistorical. I wouldn't go so far as to say that everyone should use rust, but this argument is against a straw-man. Roughly speaking, it skips over the fact that 1. history has demonstrated that memory bugs are easy to produce and hard to find and 2. even a single memory error can be devastating in terms of data and money and productivity lost If Rust eliminated most or a large class of memory errors and it was just as productive as C/C++ it would be a no brainer to at least write new, independent, systems in Rust. I think its reasonable to assume that Rust manages to eliminate many memory errors, but whether it comes at too high a cost is the real question, along with the lock in and network effects that our legacy systems have. This essay basically doesn't address anything real.

dathinab 3y ago
I agree. Instead of saying everyone should use Rust I would say outside of a limited set of circumstances no one should use C/C++ for new projects, especially C++ given how much hidden complexity it has which you have to "magically" know. But that "limited set of circumstances" is sadly not that small and people which specialized only in C and/or C++ probably and understandably don't want to hear that either. Rust isn't the best it's not bad but it's quite mediocre tbh. (like most successful languages; coming from someone who has used rust in production since not long after the 1.0 release). I think the reason it is so successful is that it has a different set of drawbacks then many of the other alternatives. Add to that that it managed to gathered enough momentum to have enough libraries and other support and similar to use it productive in many situations and lastly it's general purpose from server, over desktop, phones to embedding as well as the web through wasm.

dathinab 3y ago

I agree. Instead of saying everyone should use Rust I would say outside of a limited set of circumstances no one should use C/C++ for new projects, especially C++ given how much hidden complexity it has which you have to "magically" know. But that "limited set of circumstances" is sadly not that small and people which specialized only in C and/or C++ probably and understandably don't want to hear that either. Rust isn't the best it's not bad but it's quite mediocre tbh. (like most successful languages; coming from someone who has used rust in production since not long after the 1.0 release). I think the reason it is so successful is that it has a different set of drawbacks then many of the other alternatives. Add to that that it managed to gathered enough momentum to have enough libraries and other support and similar to use it productive in many situations and lastly it's general purpose from server, over desktop, phones to embedding as well as the web through wasm.