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Comment by rubyfan | Hacker News Reader

I might have missed it but is there a particular advantage Rust has over C in this specific use case? Performance, ease of interoperability, etc. or is it preference for Rust over C?

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There are lots of advantages in general, especially around multithreaded code, and doubly so for anything with relatively simple data parallelism, where you can just use the rayon library.

Another advantage is that there are Rust packages for Ruby interop -- the article ended up using ruru. There are similar libraries for Python interop -- I believe the most actively developed right now is PyO3.

I'm sure people are sick of Rust evangelists on HN but it really is a wonderful language, and in certain cases it really does seem to empower people to do things they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

Safety, I guess. A Ruby developer will likely to shoot themselves in the foot with C's freedom. They can use help from Rust's guidance system.

Rust also has a much nicer package ecosystem. It's pretty trivial to wrap existing C libraries as well so I find that I can get up and running much faster rather than messing around with makefiles.

Yeah, this is the killer feature. cmake is a nightmare. Cargo does what it needs to do and gets out of your way, and provides easy access to the whole ecosystem.

History has proven that anyone no matter their abilities is going to shoot themselves in the foot regularly while using C. Some just less frequently.

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