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Comment by burntsushi | Hacker News Reader

No, I don't think so. I maintain a popular command line tool that needs to be extremely fast, and Rust was an excellent choice for that. It's made it so much easier to maintain than equivalent C tools, and has made it easier for me to reach feature parity by nearly effortlessly depending on the work that so many others have done in the ecosystem.

It's not bug free mind you, but that class of bugs doesn't include things like buffer overruns, double frees or memory leaks (note: Rust does not guarantee absence of memory leaks, but RAII pretty much makes sure it doesn't happen in practice).

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I would argue that writing it in C++ would have gotten you there faster, assuming a decent level of experience with the language. There's no ecosystem in the world that beats seamless integration with C and no language that even comes close to being as pragmatic.

> no language that even comes close to being as pragmatic.

That's what I'm disagreeing with. I find Rust to be extremely pragmatic. There are other competing tools written in C++, and from where I'm standing, their maintenance story is quite a bit harder. Conversely, my tool works seamlessly on Windows, Mac and Linux.

If multi-platform is your biggest problem, I can see how that helps. I don't really care that much myself as long as my code compiles on the unixes. I sadly agree that static linking is a pain in the behind in C/C++ land. Still, the language I'm using interacts with the way I'm thinking; if that part isn't working out, all the features in the world isn't going to help.

Indeed. Windows support was critical, and I have a ton of users there as a result of it being so easy to distribute a Rust application to them. Microsoft even picked it up and is now shipping it in VS Code. :-)

> Still, the language I'm using interacts with the way I'm thinking; if that part isn't working out, all the features in the world isn't going to help.

Sure, and there was a lot of friction between me and Rust in the beginning. But my experience---and a lot others' experience as far as I'm aware---is that the friction settles down quite a bit. But yeah, experiences can vary there!

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