If only these mythical experienced developers that never shoot themselves in the foot actually existed.
Rust is a great language, but people have to stop "marketing" it by saying things like: no matter how great you are with C, you're going to fuck up at some point, so that's why you should be using Rust. Like Go or whatever other language, the main grab needs to be a positive: you know what you're doing, and here's how (a, b, c... etc.) Rust will make you even better at what you do.
Another point, it's safe to say C isn't going away anytime soon, it sits nicely at the next approximately natural level (in abstraction) above assembly. That was a design point in the language. Yes it can be a rough tool to use, but that's a reality when you get closer to the metal. You get tremendous flexibility and that comes at a price, as all things do.
To me, modern tools like Rust are supposed to relieve part of the burden. In the common case, if I can be reasonably certain that I can't make certain classes of errors, my brainpower is freed to focus on other things and I can work with significatly less stress.
Rust is interesting because it allows you worry less without actually compromising much in capability. In the cases where I would need to be able to bypass the tooling, it is explicitly possible.
If there were as many blown off feet as comments on HN suggested technology even as it currently is simply wouldn't function.
Do you even understand how much mission and safety critical software is written in C? I think if you did you'd either have a constant panic attack (given your apparent belief that it's impossible to write "safe" C) or else have to adjust your world view a little bit.
(I still agree that results at that point will be more interesting then speculating today.)
I don't think you get to play on both sides of that fence. Some of your team has been working on Rust for that long, but I doubt any code with sigils compiles, and I doubt there were many large projects using it then. I started my stopwatch at May 2015.
> Ten years is not that long a time.
Totally agree.
> I still agree that results at that point will be more interesting then speculating today.
We'll see on May 2025. :-)
My response was to a commenter who, as far as I can tell, represents the mainstream Rust community's view: that it's impossible to write safe C or, worse, that infallibility is a reasonable standard to apply. The latter is especially vex-some from my point of view, because Rust is not infallible, I happen to find it (so far) much more pleasurable to use than either C or C++, and I would very much like to see it have broader adoption.