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Comment by astrobe_ | Hacker News Reader

I wish people would abstain from that sort of insipid comments and offer instead suggestions about how to replace 40+ years of programming (that's just for C, BTW) and teralines of code in less than a century, and who's gonna pay for this. Because that's the crux.

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The stakeholders are going to pay for it. It's not an accident that companies like Amazon and Microsoft are betting big on Rust. The cost of code quality management and vulnerability mitigation is already astronomical. If Rust can lessen that burden even a little (and it certainly can), the effort of rewriting core technologies quickly pays for itself.

And most of those "teralines" of code are legacy garbage. The core OS, a basic userland, a database and a webserver are 90% of the world's critical IT infrastructure. That doesn't take a century to rewrite.

For most of the world, though, that code is decades old, with decades of testing and battle-hardening.

You will lose all of that in a rewrite, which is why people don't do it.

I'm not arguing for or against, but:

> You will lose all of that in a rewrite

I don't think you lose everything in a rewrite in general - you still have all of the edge cases and business logic in the old code that you translate to the new code. It's not like you are implementing whatever it is from scratch.

Sure, there are opportunities for the translation to introduce regressions, but that's a vastly different argument (and I think a much more minor downside).

I’m not sure what you’d gain is worth the cost. What’s the cost in dollars and cents of SQLite cves over the past 20 years, and what would the cost be of rewriting that entire codebase?

At some point you have to come to terms with the fact that some bugs shouldn’t be fixed.

I think the cost savings is more than just the cves. You also get faster features and have to write fewer tests. You can use higher level abstractions with fewer rough edges. You may even be able to take advantage of the ecosystem more.

And you don't have to rewrite everything at once, you can do it at the function or file level bit by bit. Perhaps the parts that are changing the most are done first, or perhaps the parts with the most bugs.

I'm still not saying rewriting is always right or wrong, but I think it isn't as cut and dry as some make it sound.

> a database and a webserver

Well I have this native app fetish. I mean why pay for 4 G ram for each electron app?

No, there is more legacy code than you list there.

Hey, I have something for you. This is how my Skype looks today:

https://imgur.com/LudK5vL

Please keep those web apps.

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