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Comment by bluejekyll | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this point is often made about C++: "in the future we will have that feature too!"

If you don't want to wait, want to experiment with something else, learn a new language, etc., Rust is awesome.

Obviously the counter argument to this is, "but there's 30+ years of C++ in production", but be honest, who actually wants to work on a 30 year old codebase?

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That's why I made my proposal above. What if you could have the nice syntax now (via translation to c++ source) instead of waiting for the future?

Why do I have to wait for every compiler on every system I want to build on to update to some future standard when things could be done now across the board in many cases?

GCC is very close to the 30-year mark (0.9 released 22 March 1987). Linux turned 25 this past year; Firefox (the C++ parts, at least) is very close to 25, depending on what code you want to count. Apache is 20ish years old. Even LLVM, which I think of as a relatively young project, is getting close to 15 years. Maybe (hopefully?) very little code survives from the initial versions, but they've all withstood the test of time.

It's certainly pleasing to be able to sit down and write something from scratch or nearly from scratch. But it can be equally pleasing to extend a multi-million line codebase to do something new, or to enable the codebase as a whole to do something new/better.

:) I'm glad others enjoy doing it. Definitely one of the things I like about Rust at this point is the freshness.

The one thing I like about Rust is the fact that you can easily expose a C-like interface for libraries, which allows you to contribute to old codebases without much of a problem, best of both worlds (It has a non-trivial cost when starting, sure, but so does keeping C++).

It's not about want, it's about a requirement that they're maintained, expanded.

Yes, and perhaps I'm shirking my duty as a developer by wanting to avoid some ugly gnarly code. I will say this, I would be more likely to want to contribute to projects like these if they incorporated Rust as an alternative to C or C++ for their development.

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