3 ms·

I think the reason many people are rooting for Rust is because it's got comprehensively better features than competing languages. I'm not talking just about mem

by DCKing 12y ago

I think the reason many people are rooting for Rust is because it's got comprehensively better features than competing languages. I'm not talking just about memory safety, but also its adoption of functional language features. I'm of the opinion that immutability-by-default, pattern matching, first-class functions and real macros combined with no garbage collection are a Very Good Thing™ for this type of language (and I'm not the only one). So yeah, I disagree that any systems programming language can displace C. Other system languages simply don't come with the same amount of improvements that Rust offers.

pjmlp 12y ago
> So yeah, I disagree that any systems programming language can displace C. Other system languages simply don't come with the same amount of improvements that Rust offers. So, given my premise, how do you target super-cool-everyone-wants-it-os that only offers new-cool-language as their system programming language in the OS SDK? Are you going to write a C compiler in new-cool-language to be able to keep on using C?
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Why not cross compile?
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    You could as well. In case case the C runtime has to be implemented on top of the new-cool-language ABI, as it is the only way the vendor supports creating software for their system. What I am describing is not that different from thirty years ago when C was a UNIX only language, and other OS had other languages as their systems programming language.
- MaulingMonkey 12y ago
  > super-cool-everyone-wants-it-os that only offers new-cool-language I'd suggest that these are fundamentally incompatible statements. "Only offers new-cool-language" is another way of saying "it's a pain in the ass to port to - you have to rewrite your whole app!" if you're coming from anywhere that's ever touched not-quite-as-cool-language.

by DCKing 12y ago

pjmlp 12y ago

> So yeah, I disagree that any systems programming language can displace C. Other system languages simply don't come with the same amount of improvements that Rust offers. So, given my premise, how do you target super-cool-everyone-wants-it-os that only offers new-cool-language as their system programming language in the OS SDK? Are you going to write a C compiler in new-cool-language to be able to keep on using C?

dllthomas 12y ago
Why not cross compile?
- pjmlp 12y ago
  You could as well. In case case the C runtime has to be implemented on top of the new-cool-language ABI, as it is the only way the vendor supports creating software for their system. What I am describing is not that different from thirty years ago when C was a UNIX only language, and other OS had other languages as their systems programming language.
MaulingMonkey 12y ago
> super-cool-everyone-wants-it-os that only offers new-cool-language I'd suggest that these are fundamentally incompatible statements. "Only offers new-cool-language" is another way of saying "it's a pain in the ass to port to - you have to rewrite your whole app!" if you're coming from anywhere that's ever touched not-quite-as-cool-language.