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aaaaaaaaaab

Let’s revisit this when Rust has...

- the number of users

- the amount of mission-critical legacy code that has to compile

- the number of compiler vendors

- age

... comparable to C++’s.

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I'm not sure that's an important comparison. They're not saying that there's no good reason for the current state of C++, or that they can't understand why it's like that. They're just saying that it'd be nice if Rust didn't disintegrate into the same morass of new syntax, primitives, idioms and pitfalls that C++ has become.

According to that we should all be using COBOL

Did you hear they’re finally making it object oriented? The name will be ADD ONE TO COBOL

Cobol is already OOP for several years now.

> Cobol is already OOP for several years now.

I think that was supposed to be a joke, mocking Cobol's verboseness (compare "C++", which adds 1 to C and which extends C with OOP).

Let's also come back to it when Rust is older than C++.

It's a new language targeted toward people who want stability and performance, what do you expect to see by now?

Rust will never be older than C++ since they both get one year older every year ;)

Oh age is just an int, and it'll overflow at some point.

Interpreting GP's comment using the Principle of Charity[1], I assume GP meant "older than C++ is now".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

Or making a joke, which is supposedly verboten here.

No, the point is to get ahead of C++'s situation so as not to repeat its mistakes. You can't do that if you wait until it's too late.

> ... comparable to C++’s.

When? 2018? 1990?

In the 1990's we already had a couple of OS vendors shipping C++ compilers on their OS SDKs (Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Be, Symbian).

So far that is only true of Redox.

To be fair though 1990's C++ written in the recommended way is almost a completely different language to 2018 C++.

The change isn't as marked as say perl5 and perl6 but it is still huge.

I've no dog in either fight though, I moved to managed languages a long time ago (Object Pascal was the last compiled language I used in anger).

True, but many of the "modern C++" stuff like RAII, type safe strings, arrays, collections were already possible in C++ compilers for MS-DOS for example, it was a matter of actually using them.

Not sure which managed languages you mean, those that I use also provide the option to compile to native code just like Object Pascal, if I wish to do so.

And Fuchsia.

Fuchsia is still largely written in C++, with a couple of modules like the TCP/IP stack, written in Go, and Dart for the UI layer.

To what extent is Rust being adopted by the Fuchsia team?

There’s a few hundred thousand lines of Rust in Fuchsia. (Garnet’s repo claims 12% Rust as of today.) They’ve been hiring Rust programmers aggressively to add more. They’ve been helping drive the design and implementation of async/await, since they’re big users. Rust is one of the four or five languages that they maintain a sort-of-libc for and use it as an example for writing applications for the OS. (It’s a microkernel, so it’s not really a libc so much as it is their IPC layer, which is how you make the equivalent of syscalls in other languages. “FIDL”)

I see, so is that an indication that Zircon might eventually migrate to Rust?

I don’t think there’s any plans to move Zircon. It’s also less pressing, IMHO, since it is a microkernel. Maybe someday, but if I were in charge, it wouldn’t be super high in my list.

There's an official Rust support in SDK? There's an official SDK?

I’m talking about FIDL, to be clear: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/d4f9b980f18fc6722b06...

(And I also elaborate more about specifics in my other sibling comment)

So, when it's too late?

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