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Comment by LeFantome | Hacker News Reader

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LeFantome·

I think they had two overarching criteria:

1 - memory safe (ish)

2 - OOP

Rust was off the table because of number 2. The list gets short after that.

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Rust has all the OOP features minus class inheritance, but folks like to repeat otherwise.

All the COM programming patterns can be easily done in Rust.

Here, ray tracing in one weekend, quite closely translated from the original C++ OOP design into Rust.

https://github.com/pjmlp/RaytracingWeekend-Rust

It has to work with the existing C++ code and class hierarchy. And OOP-like API is not good enough. It was not my assessment though. It was theirs.

Sure but that is already another criteria set, similar to how Carbon is also being developed, and not a plain "doesn't do OOP", because Java OOP is not the only flavour in town, which many folks conflate OOP with.

Not only does it predate the language by a few decades, there is enough type systems variants to chose from.

I mean that excludes swift too, it can't use the C++ ABI any more than other languages can. Excepting super-specialty languages

I haven't worked with it myself but my understanding is that Swift's C++ interop has improved a lot recently and is continuing to be improved. Apple has a huge C++ codebase so they are incentivized to make Swift work well with it

https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/

The C++ interop story for Swift isn't the most clear cut, though. You're forced to use Apple's fork of llvm (meaning no GNU or mainline clang support) and there are issues tracking the current blockers[0]. Along with other related issues under the "swift" tag[1]. I don't think this was necessarily a bad technical decision, but from a lock-in and practicality perspective it seems flawed.

[0]: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933

[1]: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues?q=is%3Ais...

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