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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

Are you not a developer? Being proficient in one means that it will take very little time to transfer to the other. C++ and Rust have a great deal of overlap in that way.

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It only works one way though (at least in this case). If you know C++ you can quickly become proficient in Rust.

But not the other way around.

Yeah C++ have steep learning curve compared to Rust.

If you know rust, you can carry the same ideas to C++. My C and C++ skills greatly improved as I got better with rust. The compiler forces you to learn proper memory management and that carries over.

Smart pointers? Just Box, Rc, Arc and Refcel.

Move semantics? It's just another name for ownership.

Sure, the OOP stuff are different, but okay, that in and of itself shouldn't hinder you.

If it's an experienced C++ job and you don't know the difference between rvalue/lvalue/etc, you're gonna have a tough time.

Are you sure? Many C++ programmers who have learned rust report that it has also made them better C++ programmers.

It's not about proficiency, it's about not getting bogged down in programming language bikeshedding.

Sigh. People don't even know what bikeshed means any more.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding

If you think the differences between C++ and Rust are "unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues" then you may not know enough about either/both to contribute to the discussion.

We're talking about differences so impactful and well-recognized that everyone from Google[1] to the NSA[2] is advocating for using Rust to reduce the unsafety compared to C++. Are you saying all of them are bogged down in bikeshedding?

[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language...

[2] https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Artic...

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