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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

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29athrowaway·

If you are not already using C++, learn Rust instead.

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Coincidentally, the author already has a response for you: https://ds9a.nl/articles/posts/cpp-rust-go/

This post makes the mistake of assuming that anybody in industry writes secure C or C++ code.

- Rust doesn't have to keep 30+ years of backwards compatibility. You can learn it.

- C++ has hundreds of dialects to pick from. You'll spend time bikeshedding with coding standards, you'll spend time in meetings trying to get people to agree to a standard, you'll spend time trying to enforce the standard...

- Rust makes reasonable decisions by default, and mutable/unsafe code is opt-in.

Why learn Rust over C++?

Well, my answer is this: Coming from the perspective on a Pythonista, C++ seems tedious and error-prone. Rust, on the other hand, is merely tedious -- which is progress of a sort, one has to admit.

Coincidentally, I personally started learning Rust as C++ was a lot more difficult to learn by myself. The Rust book[1] is a great resource as it makes learning pretty complex topics fairly easy to approach.

Personally the thing that really sold me over was the "Building a guessing game" section, as it showed how to use the build system to pull in external libraries. I found these aspects specifically difficult to learn when learning C++. Plus, after learning Rust, I was able to go back to C++ and better understand it. Still have no clue about build systems though.

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

And be treated badly by the Rust community for not agreeing with their political opinions.

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