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Agreed. At this point Rust is already looking rusty. A solution desperately searching for a problem. We need something to replace C (so we are told), but maybe

Agreed. At this point Rust is already looking rusty. A solution desperately searching for a problem. We need something to replace C (so we are told), but maybe Rust won't be that tool.

throwawayanonon 12y ago
The C and C++ hate comes mainly from web developers and language hipsters. They dominate the echo chambers of HN and /r/programming. When you mention you are a C programmer or like coding in C, they begin to blabber about C being legacy, Rust this, and Go that (languages they think are more like Python). All in an effort to cope with the insecure feelings they have because the C programming language and C++ (read: pointers) intimidate them.
- oldmanjay 12y ago
  You hit the nail on the head but you didn't drive it far enough. You forgot to mention how those poor stupid little web programmers also secretly want to be awesome like you and that's why they keep doing this.
- hga 12y ago
  Definable not entirely true. I might be a language hipster (http://xkcd.com/297/ http://xkcd.com/297/) but I'm definitely not a web developer, except for back ends. The first time sharing system I used was a UNIX(TM) Release 6 system in the summer of 1978, and I started learning C after that, programming professionally in it starting in 1980. C++ in 1995, and I did several intense projects in it. I loathe C++, think it's way too dangerous, and C is obviously dangerous. I really want something safer to do systems programming in, that's successful (pretty much every prior alternative has failed in one way or another). Maybe Rust will be that.
  - throwawayanonon 12y ago
    >1978 >1980 >1995 I take it you haven't programmed in C11 or C++11? Modern C exists and C is too ubiquitous to be replaced. I'm all for new projects and new languages but I just don't understand the hype around Go and Rust as a C replacement.
    - hga 12y ago
      C++ is not a solution to anything I'm interested in (aside from the special case of perhaps wanting to use LLVM). If I was doing e.g. VLSI stuff that might be different. C99 and C11 add a variety of nice things, but they don't make the language markedly safer. How long have you spent tracking down wild pointer and using freed memory errors? Every have to convince your boss to spend $$$ on a hardware debugger to find one? (ATRON, back in the 8088 days.) Or look at Mozilla's very real world motivation for this project.
    - kaoD 12y ago
      I take it you haven't programmed in Rust.
- pcwalton 12y ago
  > All in an effort to cope with the insecure feelings they have because the C programming language and C++ (read: pointers) intimidate them. You have to know pointers and manual memory management to program in Rust. Rust isn't there to save you from having to learn about pointers. Rust is instead a reaction to the empirically observed fact that nobody [1] has ever written a multi-million-line program with a large team in C or C++ without accidentally making dangerous memory-management-related mistakes, and "just program better" is an approach that has been tried, and failed, again and again and again. [1]: OK, maybe the Mars rover and the like are counterexamples, but the extreme amount of verification required means that this approach is far too costly to be practical for most software development.
  - throwawayanonon 12y ago
    Rust will not replace C. Rust will merely exist.
    - pcwalton 12y ago
      Sure, Rust's goal isn't to convert all users of C everywhere. C is immortal; that'd be unrealistic. Our goal is indeed to exist alongside C—and to provide a more productive, more secure alternative. :)
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Rust will not replace C. Rust will replace C in some new development that would have been done in C had Rust not existed, and some existing projects may switch from C to Rust (presumably, by components, rather than as big bang conversions.) But, sure, its not like C will disappear just because Rust 1.0 exists. But it's not like anyone, ever has argued that to be the case.
- kaoD 12y ago
  I hate cowards behind throwaways. Wanna say something stupid? Do it with your real nickname.
  - real_-nickname 12y ago
    No
- scott_s 12y ago
  I do high performance systems software research and development. I mainly code in C++, and spent quite a bit of time in pure C. I think Rust is awesome.
pcwalton 12y ago
> " A solution desperately searching for a problem. We need something to replace C (so we are told), but maybe Rust won't be that tool." As someone who works with Rust on a daily basis to implement a browser engine, I can confidently say that Rust is not a solution in search of a problem for our domain. As an example, I implemented CSS "letter-spacing" the other day, and it worked first try after compiling. The layout code I write has a remarkable resilience to crashes; in the rare cases that it panics, it aborts safely. And I get parallelism "for free" as I implement more layout features, because the compiler stops me if I'm about to do something non-thread-safe. None of this applies to C or C++, and the end result is that we can move faster and write cleaner code.
- coldtea 12y ago
  The whole comment is trollish. What does "We need something to replace C (so we are told)" even means? Either he has a need to a "better/safer etc" C, or he doesn't. If he doesn't, then Rust isn't for him. And it's not like anybody tries to market Rust to people who don't need it ("so we're told").
wycats 12y ago
For what it's worth, I've been using Rust for over a year in my product (http://skylight.io http://skylight.io) and it matched my needs pretty closely. Our product is a performance monitoring tool that runs inside of Rails apps, so it's important to us to keep the overhead of our "agent" small and controllable. Since the agent runs inside of a Ruby program, our only good choices are Ruby itself or a language without a garbage collector (embedding a language with a GC inside a language with GC is asking for trouble -- take a look at the bug tracker for TheRubyRacer for some color). Our initial version of the agent was written in Ruby, but carefully controlling memory usage or performance in Ruby isn't really feasible. We prototyped a new version of the agent in C++, but I personally didn't feel comfortable shipping a binary that would run in thousands of customers' Rails apps in a language that could segfault if you're not careful. We took Rust very seriously last November, even thought it was still very young, because it gave us a language with direct control over memory with compiler-verified guarantees that our program wouldn't segfault. TLDR: Rust is a very good choice for writing performance or memory-critical code that will be embedded in a high-level-language. Also, because it offers compile-time guarantees about safety, I expect it to expand the number of cases where people feel justified in embedding a low-level language for performance-critical problems.
MichaelGG 12y ago
I'm using Rust at my startup. The prototype version was written in F#, but that means you're anyways fighting memory allocation, which was the single biggest performance issue in my program. My system works on network traffic at line rate, so every allocation per packet is noticeable. C programs doing what I'm doing have traditionally had security issues. Since our code often runs in privileged locations, that's an unacceptable risk. Plus, Rust is vastly more expressive than C and not messed up like C++. And abstractions are cheaper, too. For instance, we use Generics + Traits as a way to keep flexibility and a plugin model per frame, while keeping the performance of static dispatch. C wouldn't be able to do that in an easy way.

Agreed. At this point Rust is already looking rusty. A solution desperately searching for a problem. We need something to replace C (so we are told), but maybe Rust won't be that tool.

throwawayanonon 12y ago

The C and C++ hate comes mainly from web developers and language hipsters. They dominate the echo chambers of HN and /r/programming. When you mention you are a C programmer or like coding in C, they begin to blabber about C being legacy, Rust this, and Go that (languages they think are more like Python). All in an effort to cope with the insecure feelings they have because the C programming language and C++ (read: pointers) intimidate them.

oldmanjay 12y ago
You hit the nail on the head but you didn't drive it far enough. You forgot to mention how those poor stupid little web programmers also secretly want to be awesome like you and that's why they keep doing this.
hga 12y ago
Definable not entirely true. I might be a language hipster (http://xkcd.com/297/ http://xkcd.com/297/) but I'm definitely not a web developer, except for back ends. The first time sharing system I used was a UNIX(TM) Release 6 system in the summer of 1978, and I started learning C after that, programming professionally in it starting in 1980. C++ in 1995, and I did several intense projects in it. I loathe C++, think it's way too dangerous, and C is obviously dangerous. I really want something safer to do systems programming in, that's successful (pretty much every prior alternative has failed in one way or another). Maybe Rust will be that.
- throwawayanonon 12y ago
  >1978 >1980 >1995 I take it you haven't programmed in C11 or C++11? Modern C exists and C is too ubiquitous to be replaced. I'm all for new projects and new languages but I just don't understand the hype around Go and Rust as a C replacement.
  - hga 12y ago
    C++ is not a solution to anything I'm interested in (aside from the special case of perhaps wanting to use LLVM). If I was doing e.g. VLSI stuff that might be different. C99 and C11 add a variety of nice things, but they don't make the language markedly safer. How long have you spent tracking down wild pointer and using freed memory errors? Every have to convince your boss to spend $$$ on a hardware debugger to find one? (ATRON, back in the 8088 days.) Or look at Mozilla's very real world motivation for this project.
  - kaoD 12y ago
    I take it you haven't programmed in Rust.
pcwalton 12y ago
> All in an effort to cope with the insecure feelings they have because the C programming language and C++ (read: pointers) intimidate them. You have to know pointers and manual memory management to program in Rust. Rust isn't there to save you from having to learn about pointers. Rust is instead a reaction to the empirically observed fact that nobody [1] has ever written a multi-million-line program with a large team in C or C++ without accidentally making dangerous memory-management-related mistakes, and "just program better" is an approach that has been tried, and failed, again and again and again. [1]: OK, maybe the Mars rover and the like are counterexamples, but the extreme amount of verification required means that this approach is far too costly to be practical for most software development.
- throwawayanonon 12y ago
  Rust will not replace C. Rust will merely exist.
  - pcwalton 12y ago
    Sure, Rust's goal isn't to convert all users of C everywhere. C is immortal; that'd be unrealistic. Our goal is indeed to exist alongside C—and to provide a more productive, more secure alternative. :)
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Rust will not replace C. Rust will replace C in some new development that would have been done in C had Rust not existed, and some existing projects may switch from C to Rust (presumably, by components, rather than as big bang conversions.) But, sure, its not like C will disappear just because Rust 1.0 exists. But it's not like anyone, ever has argued that to be the case.
kaoD 12y ago
I hate cowards behind throwaways. Wanna say something stupid? Do it with your real nickname.
- real_-nickname 12y ago
  No
scott_s 12y ago
I do high performance systems software research and development. I mainly code in C++, and spent quite a bit of time in pure C. I think Rust is awesome.

pcwalton 12y ago

> " A solution desperately searching for a problem. We need something to replace C (so we are told), but maybe Rust won't be that tool." As someone who works with Rust on a daily basis to implement a browser engine, I can confidently say that Rust is not a solution in search of a problem for our domain. As an example, I implemented CSS "letter-spacing" the other day, and it worked first try after compiling. The layout code I write has a remarkable resilience to crashes; in the rare cases that it panics, it aborts safely. And I get parallelism "for free" as I implement more layout features, because the compiler stops me if I'm about to do something non-thread-safe. None of this applies to C or C++, and the end result is that we can move faster and write cleaner code.

coldtea 12y ago
The whole comment is trollish. What does "We need something to replace C (so we are told)" even means? Either he has a need to a "better/safer etc" C, or he doesn't. If he doesn't, then Rust isn't for him. And it's not like anybody tries to market Rust to people who don't need it ("so we're told").

wycats 12y ago

For what it's worth, I've been using Rust for over a year in my product (http://skylight.io http://skylight.io) and it matched my needs pretty closely. Our product is a performance monitoring tool that runs inside of Rails apps, so it's important to us to keep the overhead of our "agent" small and controllable. Since the agent runs inside of a Ruby program, our only good choices are Ruby itself or a language without a garbage collector (embedding a language with a GC inside a language with GC is asking for trouble -- take a look at the bug tracker for TheRubyRacer for some color). Our initial version of the agent was written in Ruby, but carefully controlling memory usage or performance in Ruby isn't really feasible. We prototyped a new version of the agent in C++, but I personally didn't feel comfortable shipping a binary that would run in thousands of customers' Rails apps in a language that could segfault if you're not careful. We took Rust very seriously last November, even thought it was still very young, because it gave us a language with direct control over memory with compiler-verified guarantees that our program wouldn't segfault. TLDR: Rust is a very good choice for writing performance or memory-critical code that will be embedded in a high-level-language. Also, because it offers compile-time guarantees about safety, I expect it to expand the number of cases where people feel justified in embedding a low-level language for performance-critical problems.

MichaelGG 12y ago

I'm using Rust at my startup. The prototype version was written in F#, but that means you're anyways fighting memory allocation, which was the single biggest performance issue in my program. My system works on network traffic at line rate, so every allocation per packet is noticeable. C programs doing what I'm doing have traditionally had security issues. Since our code often runs in privileged locations, that's an unacceptable risk. Plus, Rust is vastly more expressive than C and not messed up like C++. And abstractions are cheaper, too. For instance, we use Generics + Traits as a way to keep flexibility and a plugin model per frame, while keeping the performance of static dispatch. C wouldn't be able to do that in an easy way.