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Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

> A colleague once claimed that there is nothing wrong with out-of-bounds accesses as long as we don’t crash.

I need to find the source, but someone pointed out that the safety advantages of Rust are, in part, cultural and I increasingly agree. People use Rust because they care about memory safety and that care is reflected in the programs they write.

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I keep getting code reviews with manual new/delete calls despite unique_ptr being 11 years old.

weirdly I see this most often from programmers who started college less than 11 years ago. Our accidemics are not helping.

The optimist in me would like to delude themselves thinking that most of the people smart/experienced enough to make the jump to unique_ptr from new/delete realized this is closing a porthole on the titanic and made the jump to something that isn’t C++.

I am not sure. C++ is a tool. I use what my company and companies in my domain use. I wouldn't mind using Rust, but there's just very little momentum. So meanwhile I do my best with what we have.

Personally, I care more about what I do than which tool I am using.

> I wouldn't mind using Rust

Rust is not the only thing that “isn’t C++”. Go is not appropriate for every domain either but you can bet your bottom dollar that it has taken market share from C++ - which I think the world is on the overall balance better off for, and I don’t particularly like Go as a language. Someone is making gobs of money off of OCaml.

> I care more about what I do than which tool I am using.

I don’t agree with the implication that these are independent factors.

And I do get it. The Rust ecosystem founders in many areas and the RIIR meme crew on forums is annoying. That doesn’t forgive the failings of the C++ ecosystem.

We have a lot of existing c++. I still cannot figure out how to mix with anything else. Nothing else wants to deal with vector for instance.

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