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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

Curious - what class of problems do you see Rust and its ecosystem handling that C++ doesn't?

Rust may allow 100 engineers to work on the same codebase without spending all their time debugging memory corruption errors. I say "may" because I don't have firsthand experience in a team that big.

I'm hoping to hear something other than debugging memory corruption errors. I've worked in C++ for 15 years in 4 different organizations and across many different teams and memory corruption was never really an issue, certainly not enough of an issue to abandon C++ and adopt a whole new ecosystem. This is the primary reason I hear for adopting Rust and it just isn't an issue for me so I'm interested in learning what other classes of problems does Rust and its ecosystem resolve?

> and it just isn't an issue for me

You have those two findings from Google and Microsoft that roughly 2/3 of the vulnerabilities that they find in their code are memory related, so it is definitely something that someone finds important. Also, if you have large scale codebase that is serving millions of people, the assurance of less bugs is much better starting proposition than maybe it won't fail.

I wonder if part of the problem Google and Microsoft has is they have so many developers having so little real-world experience in a language such as C++? Back in the day we used to be very careful with who did C++ work because it makes it so easy for inexperienced developers to shoot themselves in the foot. But really though, for an established team not having these kinds of issues and not having a lot of new hires to contend with then what else is Rust providing?

No idea. However, every sufficiently complex project will become harder to manage with the accumulation of changed requirements, refactorings, and unavailable contributors. For this reason only the automated analysis of code could benefit an organization by transfering part of the work outside of the human competency domain.

If you aren't handling string data from external sources then memory bugs aren't a big deal, I think most low level developers today don't deal with a lot of external string data so to them Rust doesn't really offer much. But for the roles where almost all you do is pipe or parse around data packets then I see the strong appeal, but to me such applications aren't very interesting. So crypto libraries, browser engines and the networking part of servers.

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