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Comment by 1qaz2wsx | Hacker News Reader

+1. As a C++ developer with decade of experience, I'm finding Rust hard. It is a truly innovative language with a rising ecosystem that makes life of developers easier in a lot of areas. But overall the safety and performance benefits do not seem to be worth the effort if you just want to get things done. My thinking is, if you are smart enough to master Rust, and you do need tight control of memory that GC overhead is not worth it, you are probably smart enough to write safer C++.

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> if you are smart enough to master Rust, and you do need tight control of memory that GC overhead is not worth it, you are probably smart enough to write safer C++.

As both a C/C++ developer with more than a decade of experience, and a Rust developer, I'll posit that if you are smart enough to master Rust, you still aren't smart enough to write safer C++. Not even close. Rust might enlighten you in some ways, and avoid you doing some mistakes in C++, but without e.g. a borrow-checker, there are still too many ways to shoot yourself in the foot in C++, that Rust would find at compile time, while the equivalent C++ code would fail at runtime. If you're lucky and happen to hit the error conditions when you test it.

> My thinking is, if you are smart enough to master Rust, and you do need tight control of memory that GC overhead is not worth it, you are probably smart enough to write safer C++.

Easy for you to say as a C++ developer! As someone who came to Rust as a JavaScript/PHP/Python developer, I greatly appreciate Rust checking all my work. I'm plenty smart enough to work out the problems that the compiler picks up (once I have an error message I can google for explanations and solutions), I just don't/didn't have the experience to know that my naive code was going to cause problems.

Most of the issues described in the article on closures are identical to C++, or have direct C++ equivalents (it even helpfully points them out!).

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