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Comment by sigi64 | Hacker News Reader

I was a C++ programmer for 25 years. Last 3 years, I'm using Rust language in my daily job and for all my hobby projects. I will not return to work in C++ again. No money can make me to change my decision. Nowadays, programming is a pure joy for me again. This was not the case when I had to work with C++.

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I've drank C++'s kool aid. I believe in the vision and think of everything in C++ terms.

...I think I could last about 3 months in another language before I'd forgotten too much to go back.

I doubt that's true. I haven't used C++ for many years now. I was in your boat a few years ago (C/C++ since 1990) but now 6+ years Python then Rust centric. I still think in C++ terms when writing rust, although most of the time it's "I would need 10 lines to do this 1 line of rust code were I still using C++."

I dabble in C++ occasionally as a contractor. No problem picking up the new features and making useful contributions.

C++ maps pretty directly into Rust. I found it useful to understand the underlying data representation in memory. For instance https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/repr-rust.html

I moved into managed compiled languages back in 2006, still dabble in C++ pretty much ok, and code is relatively modern (enjoying modules in VC++ nowadays).

same here. I've pounded C++ and C code for 20+ years. Rust is the right tool to replace both of these. Long live Richie (well maybe not him but his work), Kernighan and Stroustrup.

long time C++ programmer here too, 30ish years, but I don't use it for much anymore. While I like that the language has improved, it's just a nicer experience coding in other languages.

I agree. No matter gray beards bashing Rust on HN every time it comes up, programming in Rust brings me joy and I will never use C++ again if I have a choice.

Interesting; could this be because you've been using outdated C++ ? (legacy codebases started before C++98 tend to be particularly painful)

FWIW, I prefer the power of C++ over Rust's hand-holding; but can also see its appeal for someone that's not as confident over the minutia.

Not the person you asked, but for me (coming from C++20, with lambdas, async, etc), the big win is that the borrow checker automates away boring PR comments about "you used std::unique_ptr in a non-idiomatic way that is technically safe, and it bleeds memory unsafety into some random API, so write this level N+1 magic instead".

It also checks that all my threaded code is data race free.

On the downside, it's support for safe (in the sense that the compiler checks it) lock free programming is basically non-existent, which means that stuff that would be easy in C++ ends up being in Rust unsafe blocks that you need a PhD in type theory to reason about.

  > On the downside, it's support for safe (in the sense that the compiler checks it) lock free programming is basically non-existent, which means that stuff that would be easy in C++ ends up being in Rust unsafe blocks that you need a PhD in type theory to reason about.

I'm not familiar with the C++ built-in facilities for lock-free stuff (but learning about them currently)

Could you expand on this if you're willing, maybe with some pseudocode?

I've also been curious about things like cache alignment, aligned memory, and false-sharing size detection in Rust -- all of which C++ has as std built-ins

Rust has atomic types that rely on interior mutability. No unsafe blocks are needed for those.

> ... but can also see its appeal for someone that's not as confident over the minutia.

I think this is mischaracterization of why people choose Rust (and FWIW it comes across as condescending). People choose Rust over C++ partially for the same reason people write unit tests. We accept that no matter how good we are at writing software, we are still fallible, and so we introduce structures around our work to minimize the fallout from that fallibility.

No, it‘s exactly the opposite: I enjoyed C++ 11 but trying any feature tacked on beyond that just makes me want to smack my head onto my desk.

The standard isn‘t slowing down: for c++ 23 the committee has announced even more features when compilers haven‘t yet implemented every CPP 17 feature. What good is a standard if no one is following it?

> but can also see its appeal for someone that's not as confident over the minutia

It's not confidence, I just don't care. I don't want to learn the minutia of C++. Rust is the thing that has got me interested in lower level programming.

i will admit to the beard, but isn't it strange that the number of posts praising rust and haskell has dropped of a cliff here in the past months?

There are just as many written-in-Rust posts as ever, although the practice of appending "in Rust" to the title has fallen off (there's literally one of these at #3 on the front page right now). Meanwhile, an article from IEEE evangelizing Haskell was literally on the front page this morning with 256 votes.

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