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Comment by codr7 | Hacker News Reader

C/C++ are two very different languages.

Zig seems to follow the C tradition, and Rust C++.

Why do people say Rust follows the tradition of C++? Rust follows very different design decisions than C++ like a different approach to backwards compatibility, it does not tack on one feature on top of another, it is memory safe etc that are very different from C++. If you are just comparing the size of language, there are other complex languages out there like D, Ada etc

> Why do people say Rust follows the tradition of C++?

They mean the domain that Rust is in.

Before Rust there was only C or C++ for real time programming. C++ was an experiment (wildly successful IMO when I left it in 2001) trying to address the shortcomings of C. It turned out that too much of everything was in C++, long compile times, a manual several inches thick, huge executables. Some experiments turned out not to be a good idea (exceptions, multiple inheritance, inheritance from concrete classes....)

Rust is a successor in that sense. It draws on the lessons of C++ and functional programming.

I hope I live long enough to see the next language in this sequence that learns form the mistakes of Rust (there are a few, and it will take some more years to find them all)

Some of C++'s warts are still available in Rust, though, such as long compile times. Additionally it encourages using a lot of dependencies, too, just like npm does.

Anyways, I dislike C++, it is too bloated and I would rather just use C.

It was no experiment at all, it was Bjarne Stroustroup way to never ever repeat his downgrade experience from Simula to BCPL, after he started working at Bell Labs and was originally going to have to write a distributed systems infrastructure in C.

Also there have been alternatives to C and C++, even if they tend to be ignored by most folks.

Bjarne Stroustroup describes it as experimental. At least he used to back when I cared a lot

I am quite sure that isn't the story as described on either "Design and Evolution of C++", or "C++ ARM", as owner of those books.

The one big (and IMHO most problematic) thing that Rust and C++ have in common is the desire to implement important core features via the stdlib instead of new language syntax. Also both C++ and Rust use RAII for 'garbage collection' and the 'zero-cost-abstraction promise' is the same, with the same downsides (low debug-mode runtime performance and high release-mode build times).

While I don’t disagree that there’s a similar desire regarding libraries vs syntax, Rust is also more willing to make things first class language features if there’s a benefit. Enums vs std::variant, for example.

And it's a balance act, both approaches to language design have merit.

That being said, I can't work with std::variant, and God knows I tried to like it. Rust's enums look a lot nicer by comparison, haven't had enough experience to run into potential rough edges which I'm sure are there.

For me the defining feature of C++ are its move semantics. It permeates every corner of your C++ code and affects every decision you make as a C++ developer.

Rust's defining feature is its borrow checker, which solves a similar problem as move semantics, but is more powerful and has saner defaults.

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