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> a rewrite for “maintainability” is an engineer saying they want to rewrite in their preferred language Not necessarily—sometimes languages are especially poo
by ForTheKidz 2y ago
> a rewrite for “maintainability” is an engineer saying they want to rewrite in their preferred language
Not necessarily—sometimes languages are especially poorly suited for tasks or difficult to hire for.
- maccard 2y agoWe’re talking about a rust rewrite of a fairly core level library. I don’t think C is inherently unsuitable or difficult to hire for. If the library was in Fortran then maybe. But yes you are technically correct, congratulations.
- ForTheKidz 2y agoI was responding to a general claim. In any case, I certainly disagree that C is suitable in 2025 for the vast majority of possible use-cases. For fun? Sure, but not for shipping code you want to rely on. Obviously the code isn't going anywhere, and obviously we DO have reliable code we've built with C. But acting like C and Rust deliver equivalent value is simply farcical: you choose C for rapid development and cheap devs (or some other niche concern, like using an obscure embedded arch), and you choose rust to solve the problems that C introduced.
- johnisgood 2y agoMillion dollar question: why Rust over <insert any memory safe language>? Common Lisp? OCaml, Ada / SPARK, etc. if not C?