Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Its not unreasonable to expect Rust to have looked at history, and improved upon it. To start out less than C means what? We don't want to wait 50 years for another language to 'mature'. Why can't it start out as good as, or even a step ahead of what came before?

That may be the source of the disappointment surrounding deployment of Rust - why is it behind and not ahead of other tools?

View on HN

That doesn't make any sense. What do you mean "less than C"? Rust definitely looked at history and improved upon it, that's the whole point of the language! The author's gripe was that they feel Rust is evolving quickly much beyond C (like C++), not that it's trying to catch up on C. And do you really expect a language to just appear one day, fully grown, like Venus from a seashell?

The author's opinion of Rust being less is that, an opinion. It does have large advantages over C: memory safety, an incredibly powerful type system, a compiler that supports detailed error messages, a powerful build tool (Cargo), an expressive macro system, etc.

Others who have built applications with Rust seem to be coming away with a much different impression that the author. He does mention some gaps (lack of a spec, unstable ABI) but these are not hardstops for all usecases. The main thread of complaints appear to be from lack of choice of tooling and compilers.

I'd wager that the advantages outweigh the drawbacks for many projects, though not all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com