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Comment by rootw0rm | Hacker News Reader

I love C. It's what I learned after learning MASM style Intel assembly.

I have a project still at the planning stage. I have many Rust crates lined up. So far I really like the bits of Rust I have learned. C plus generics? Sign me up! But damn, after coming from really awesome IDEs like Visual Studio, it just seems like it's taking me forever to make progress.

Right now I'm asking myself, does Rust save me time in the long run from chasing down bugs? I'm not really sure, because I think I'm already decent at avoiding C foot guns.

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The use-case for Rust is not the same as C.

In general, C is a better option if you find you are escaping to macro defined Assembly or other memory ops (glib back-ported data structures for C highly recommended). Rust likes to keep unsafe operations organized, but is a persistent pain if a problem scope requires many "unsafe" operations.

I'd wager Rust will end up like Boost... really cool.. but too chaotic to trust past 10 months. =)

I don't get the 10 months part. is it some reference?

It refers to the degenerative nature of iterative specifications:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

i.e. the attempt to "improve" ultimately adds additional complexity, and defeats its stated purpose due to conflicting use-cases.

I'm not sure if I agree with any statement of the form "The use-case for Rust is not the same as foo." for any foo where Rust is replacing a language that replaced foo.

Rust is replacing C++ in several well documented places, however C++ itself was a replacement for C in many places. So by definition the use-case for Rust overlaps the use-case for C.

Arguments like this sound like old arguments that were re-told to me by my father where people argued that C couldn't replace the use case for Algol at the University of Michigan MTS system. (Assuming I'm remembering the second-hand argument right. I'm a second generation software engineer.)

Also, there's nothing of note in the last 10 months about Rust that's different from the 10 months before that.

"C++ itself was a replacement for C"

Actually, Cpp originally was a C template pre-compiler if I recall... just like Rust was. Note, people argue for years about various language merits.

"there's nothing of note in the last 10 months"

Indeed, still a pain to build, port, and package on some systems due to the poor project design required dependencies. There are papers pointing out the common fallacy of increased memory safety with the current Rust builds as well.

Of course, Rust may work fine for whatever you are building. =)

Because after losing Simula's productivity to BCPL, Bjarne Stroustrup promised to himself never to do it again.

So when he started at Bell Labs and all it had was C, he quickly got busy getting his high level tooling back.

Being a C preprocessor was the quickest way to achieve that goal.

> Arguments like this sound like old arguments that were re-told to me by my father where people argued that C couldn't replace the use case for Algol at the University of Michigan MTS system.

The problem with those comments is that they are intellectually lazy, and use age as a proxy for "better". Language X can be designed with specific features in mind that offer interesting features that Language Y fails to offer, but that is not ensured by the release date, nor might that be an acceptable tradeoff when considering other factors.

do you have Rust-analyzer and also the other coc-rust plugin for vim installed?

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