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We don't have a lot of place for religion in my industry, and safe, performant low level code is everything. Writing and debugging such code in Rust is just eas

We don't have a lot of place for religion in my industry, and safe, performant low level code is everything. Writing and debugging such code in Rust is just easier and faster than in C. Two years ago I was casually learning Rust by night while by day I was extending a scheduler I had previously written in C. I kept wishing I could switch, because I kept having to handcraft in C things I would have gotten for nearly free in Rust. Now, we're designing the Rust replacement for that C program, and it is taking all my will power not to start coding it: that job falls to someone else, and I am wistful about it. Not because I am going to miss the C code, but because it would just be so much fun to do in Rust.

uecker 2y ago
Not sure you are trolling us or not, but there is a bit of a contradiction between "here is a huge learning curve to Rust, one that I am still climbing," in the comment above and "is just easier and faster than in C". It is certainly true that you have a lot of things you can easily have at your fingertips with cargo in Rust, which you might need to first identify or even handcraft (if you have no existing framework to rely on) in C. On the other hand, I am not sure this is a good thing. I am a bit skeptical about the cargo / NPM style of package management.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  > but there is a bit of a contradiction between "here is a huge learning curve to Rust, one that I am still climbing," in the comment above and "is just easier and faster than in C I see no contradiction when you realize that no one has ever been proficient enough in C to write code that is free from UB… The problem with C is that cannot realistically be written by humans, so pretty much any language (except C++ …) is going to be “easier than C”.
  - segfaltnh 2y ago
    Wild claims. So many huge projects have been successfully written in C by humans. There are patterns to solve all the built in solutions provided by Rust, how do you imagine Rust got them in the first place? One tiny example of many here is the Linux kernel.
    - pdimitar 2y ago
      I'd say we didn't have many options back then except for C and no more than 4-5 others. So we did the things you quoted _despite_ C's drawbacks, not because of them. I can very easily imagine doing the same things with Rust, with small amount of exceptions (that the core team is working on even now). And yes Rust learned from the mistakes of the languages before it. Is that a bad thing?

uecker 2y ago

Not sure you are trolling us or not, but there is a bit of a contradiction between "here is a huge learning curve to Rust, one that I am still climbing," in the comment above and "is just easier and faster than in C". It is certainly true that you have a lot of things you can easily have at your fingertips with cargo in Rust, which you might need to first identify or even handcraft (if you have no existing framework to rely on) in C. On the other hand, I am not sure this is a good thing. I am a bit skeptical about the cargo / NPM style of package management.

littlestymaar 2y ago
> but there is a bit of a contradiction between "here is a huge learning curve to Rust, one that I am still climbing," in the comment above and "is just easier and faster than in C I see no contradiction when you realize that no one has ever been proficient enough in C to write code that is free from UB… The problem with C is that cannot realistically be written by humans, so pretty much any language (except C++ …) is going to be “easier than C”.
- segfaltnh 2y ago
  Wild claims. So many huge projects have been successfully written in C by humans. There are patterns to solve all the built in solutions provided by Rust, how do you imagine Rust got them in the first place? One tiny example of many here is the Linux kernel.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    I'd say we didn't have many options back then except for C and no more than 4-5 others. So we did the things you quoted _despite_ C's drawbacks, not because of them. I can very easily imagine doing the same things with Rust, with small amount of exceptions (that the core team is working on even now). And yes Rust learned from the mistakes of the languages before it. Is that a bad thing?