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Comment by bukotron | Hacker News Reader

Rust does not solve any problem existing in expecienced C++ developer career. You dont write modern C++ code in such a way memory leak or dangling pointer is possible at all)

This is exactly WHY we dont see a rush movement of C++ developers to Rust throwing away everything for Rust. Rust is trying to solve problems that already not exist 99.9999% of time in modern C++ code style and standards.

Also, some day C++ compilers or tooling will get its own Borrow Checker to completely forget about Rust - this will be done just for fun just to stop arguing with rust-fans :)

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This is a very bad take. Rust does solve very real problems in C family languages.

The number of people I met in Rust conferences that rewriting at least parts of rather big C++ codebases weren't small either.

However, there is still big amount of code that is purely C++. Many of the older code bases still use C++03-style code too. Or they were written in the OOP design pattern golden era that requires huge reactors to adapt functional / modern code. Anything with Qt will not benefit from smart pointers. Even with Qt 6.

Rust cannot solve these problems since the challenges are not purely technical but social too.

I would say though that Rust has already had a profound social effect which has probably enabled those rewrites etc. It wasn't too long ago that it was brushed aside as noise yet now its gaining real momentum

Thinking that experience with C++'s many flaws will save you from running into them is delusional - just look at the number of CVEs in projects maintained by world-class C++ programmers.

No amount of fallible human vigilance will stop you from forgetting the existence of a C++ quirk in the code you're rushing out before heading out for the night. Human oversight does not scale.

This is true ... except that Rust doesn't actually do any better in that regard.

Rust solves 1 category of problems in a way that is not without its costs and other consequences. That is it. There are projects where this is very important, there are other projects where its virtually useless and the consequences just get in the way. It is not magic. It doesn't make anything actually 'safe'.

sure, but don't forget that rust gives us also a nice tooling, functional syntax sugar like pattern matching, enums, monads; and other more or less useful things like explicit lifetimes

Of course. This is kind of to be expected as it has the benefit of hindsight of 25+ years. It is infinitely easier to design better things with all the accumulated experience and know-how of what works and what doesn't under your belt. It would have been truly horrifying if that had not been the case.

That being said, Rust is really about lifetimes. That's the big ticket selling point. My point above was that 1) it isn't a silver bullet and 2) it can be a real hindrance is many applications.

Tbh, only a mother can love Rust's syntax. It has even more "punctuation" than C++.

what is this 1 category?

When looking at the number of CVEs you'll also have to take the amount of code written in that language into account, a language which has no users also has no CVEs ;)

I bet there's easily tens of thousands of times more C++ code than Rust code out there.

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