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Comment by aninteger | Hacker News Reader

This article is a bit click-baity. It's more about busting myths by a particular C++ programmer against rust.

Anyway for a truth (well maybe it is a myth?) that we can't bust yet... Rust is simply not available on all platforms that C++ is. Two platforms that I think are missing:

* 16-bit MS-DOS

* 32-bit PowerPC (Linux)

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> * 16-bit MS-DOS

That's not entirely true - you actually can create .COM executables: https://github.com/ellbrid/rust_dos

That's 32-bit DOS, not the same.

How much active development of new software is being done for MS-DOS? Really curious to know.

I'd hope that he was just joking with that list

I’m sure there’s some POS systems that are maintained on MS DOS.

Is anyone besides embedded doing _any_ 32-bit dev outside of maintaining legacy code?

I mean 64-bit PowerPc is by now around 17 Years old and even 15 years ago some of the most widespread users of PowerPc (Xbox) switched to using 64 bit PowerPc architecture...

Embedded sounds like a great domain for Rust that it sadly often cannot really be used in.

Rust is promoted all the time as the sensible choice for embedded work instead of C or C++.

The thing is “embedded” is an extremely broad space. There’s a bunch of Rust stuff going on in some corners, and absolutely none in others.

Yeah, to clarify, it’s often touted as great for embedded but wholly impractical, it turns out, for some things. Which can be alarming and unexpected

Xbox 360 still ran in 32bit mode with the exception of the hypervisor. No use of 64bit pointers on a system with a max of 1GB of RAM other than just wasting cache space, and there's no real other benefit tacked on like you see in other 64-bit archs.

Thanks I didn't know this. I just looked up since when PowerPc 64-bit is a think.

Ah. In that case the PowerPC 620 was a 64 bit design from the late nineties.

Depends what you mean by "embedded," but almost every set-top box and TV has a 32 bit ARM SOC. These run software under active development: web browsers, Netflix, etc.

Yup, I included set-top into embedded, too.

Also just to be clear I don't say that rust isn't for embedding, just currently development is focused around server (and kinda desktop) usage with some focus on some of the most wide spread embedding targets.

I hope in the future rust will be the go-to alternative for C/C++ in any use-case (at least any which llvm supports). But we are not there yet. But we are slowly getting there step by step.

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