Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbandela1 | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, what was your programming background. Have you used C++ a lot especially “modern C++”?

I find that as a C++ programmer, Rust encodes in the compiler a lot of best practices about ownership and memory management. Using Rust is a breath of fresh air in not having to worry about dangling references.

From experience programming C++, I can see what the error messages are trying to prevent and why it is important.

However, if your experience was primarily with managed/garbage collected languages, a lot of the Rust compiler pedantry is stuff that you never had to worry about to being with and you have never experienced the pain it is trying to prevent.

View on HN

I had a stint as a C++14 programmer, and I switched over to C++20 for this project.

You covered the downsides pretty well, big upsides for C++:

- ability to use C libraries directly - and thus original C API docs. I've got battlescars from NPMs deep dependency trees, and cargo is a similar story.

- I don't need the (very patient and knowledgeable!) people on rust discord to hold my hand every day. There's a stackoverflow for almost every C++ issue.

- that 5% edge case where the codes safe but the borrow checker isn't happy I can just write. No RefCell or nightly compiler.

> ability to use C libraries directly - and thus original C API docs. I've got battlescars from NPMs deep dependency trees, and cargo is a similar story.

This is something Rust is relatively good at, you just may need some unsafe blocks, but assuming you can compile using clang for the C code everything tends to work well. I am saying this as a Rust skeptic.

Of course you will also write the 5% edge case where you've wrongly convinced yourself that it's fine. In general the sort of self-discipline that would likely ensure this doesn't happen also satisfies the borrow checker which might be why some people find this not a problem and others really struggle. Worth somebody studying perhaps.

I think that's a big philosophical difference I have with the rust culture - static analysis is a tool, not a religion. Useful, but nowhere near enough by itself to make reliable software.

Agree with this wholeheartedly.. I was a hardcore c++ dev by day for 7 years straight and picking up rust was like the best thing I ever did. If anything it made me a much better c++ programmer by the end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com