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Comment by intc | Hacker News Reader

I personally don't appreciate the idea of using Rust as an overall "only solution" replacement. Requires LLVM (a huge overkill on a system otherwise based on GCC), no proper support for dynamic linking, own build system, absolutely huge "ecosystem", No standardization (-> no competing implementations), SLOW to compile... Yada-yada.

Rust it self also has it's fare share of free after use etc bugs. Please check: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=Rust

I'm personally thankful that we have SQLite which is written in C - It's efficient, tiny and severe bugs are relatively rare.

As the original article quotes: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

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> Requires LLVM (a huge overkill on a system otherwise based on GCC), no proper support for dynamic linking, own build system, absolutely huge "ecosystem", No standardization (-> no competing implementations), SLOW to compile.

All of those are secondary if Rust is able to reliably produce memory safe software.

> Rust it self also has it's fare share of free after use etc bugs. Please check: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=Rust

A relatively quick skim through those issues seems to indicate that the unsafe keyword really is unsafe. I wonder if SQLite can be written without it Rust?

> own build system

Nothing in Rust requires you to use Cargo. It's really convenient to have a good build system like Cargo—but if you like C style of manually invoking the compiler, rustc can do that too.

Rust is no worse by bundling Cargo. It strictly dominates the alternative, which would be to just ship rustc and allow the user to pick whatever build system they like. You still can pick your favorite build system; but if you don't have a particularly strong preference, Cargo is a very good default.

I 100% agree with your complaints about Rust; you might notice that I provided Rust as an example that I dislike, as it is well-known, not as an "only solution". However, I disagree (strongly) with your decision to continued interest in using C: please use almost anything at all other than C (including C++, which isn't perfect but is infinitely better than C++ due to features such as deconstructors).

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