Rust lobbyists winning

  • kleeon [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 days ago

    I am mostly joking but rust is quite annoying and is only useful in very specific circumstances. I’m not against encouraging people to use better designed languages than C though

          • neo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            9 days ago

            Most C++ programmers don’t actually understand lifetimes or even basic memory safety.

            Fingers crossed I get this job I’m applying for where they actually care about this.

                  • neo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    9 days ago

                    I was being serious. I offhandedly expressed some excitement, in a comment I forgot I even wrote, about interviewing at a place that writes modern c++. Which, if you don’t know, c++11 and especially beyond has features to manage lifetimes, ownership, memory, and other important things just as Rust does (but it’s still C++, so of course it has all the baggage C++ must carry and a compiler that doesn’t enforce any of this).

                    But you rushed at the opportunity to be a complete ass about it and insult me for no reason. Presumably you also dismissively assumed I’ve never written Rust. Or that in 2024 the Rust jobs are so overflowing that I can just take my pick at one at my own leisure. As if my first preference is to write software in a language that still requires forward declarations.

                    Yeah. You had such a good point, though. I really would rather not have an income in favor of writing perfectly memory safe software that nobody uses. Surely you have advice on that?

      • TrashGoblin [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        10 days ago

        Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. For application code, it’s almost always better to use a language with garbage collection, in order to get memory safety without undue ceremony. Yes, some gc-ed languages are slow (Python, Ruby), but others are quite fast (JVM, .NET, Common Lisp, Haskell).

    • someone [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 days ago

      If you’re looking to write the types of server daemons often written in C, Go is another good choice. It’s very C-like in its syntax. It has a lot of the same safety features Rust has but isn’t nearly as complex to learn. It also has a huge standard library, so you rarely need to rely on third-party code.

      Go isn’t too suitable for drivers or kernels or other kinds of system software though. Rust is definitely a better choice for those.