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Comment by jimktrains2 | Hacker News Reader

> Rust is basically C with hardcoded checks enforced and put in by compiler that good programmers already know to put in.

I have a feeling you know absolutely nothing about rust.

Even the best programmers and programs in C have issues with what the borrow checker will catch. Moreover, the expressiveness of the type system is world's above and beyond any other main-stream (so not Haskell or ocamel) language. Saying it's C with checks is like saying French and Hungarian are the same, but with some different words.

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> I have a feeling you know absolutely nothing about rust.

Please edit uncivil swipes out of your comments here. The rest of what you wrote is fine.

I think you are correct about Rust being substantially different from C, but that's a nasty way of saying it ("you know absolutely nothing about..."). Is it really necessary to speak that way?

It wasn't that nasty. Might just be because I have no sympathy for people saying things like they are fact, yet don't know what they are talking about.

Except the context of the quote was OS architecture so dmitrygr was correct -- Rust will not provide different OS architectures.

Moreover, it was mean-spirited. Probably because they were reacting to the second part of dmitrygr's quote.

On a fundamental level, sure, a new language doesn't inherently make a new architecture possible. But you have to think of it from an affordance perspective: what architecture does Rust make easier or better?

Consider the Stylo project in Firefox, for example. Yes, Mozilla could have done the parallelization in C++ instead of Rust. They even tried! Twice! But it failed both times. That doesn't mean that it's impossible.

In my experience, this is what people mean when they say things like this.

Sure, but you're moving the goalposts :)

Look, I'm a big fan of Rust - I want to see it succeed. I go to Rust meetups in my city, I've advocated for it's adoption in my company, yadda yadda. But I don't these vague half-truths are good for the language or the community. In fact, I think they'll be harmful to the community over time as the language will fail to live up to expectations. When I started programming, Java was in the position of Rust. It was being given so many vague platitudes that it experienced push back a few years later as developers realized it didn't fix all their problems.

I don't mean for this post to be mean or condescending. Tone is hard to transmit over the internet.

I don’t think it’s moving the goalposts. It’s where they were set in the first place. Furthermore, nobody is making promises of solving all the problems, the OP said they were interested to see what might happen, which is a very different statement than “this will happen” or “this will happen and fix everything.”

That is, I 100% agree with your comment, but I don’t see it happening in this thread.

How is that a vague half truth? Just because it’s not concrete doesn’t mean it’s either vague or only half true

Well, that's a bit not nice.

I took the "Rust is like C" line to mean is that you can use Rust anywhere you can use C, running at C speeds (the whole zero cost abstraction/no runtime/unsafe blocks), someone that can't be said about OCaml/F#/Haskell (TTBOMK).

EDIT

Moreover, if you look at context, you'll see that his point is that when it comes to OS design, a rust based OS will look mostly like a C based OS.

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