Comment by insanitybit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by insanitybit | Hacker News Reader

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Having learned C/C++ as my first languages I can say I'm quite glad for it. I was able to learn so fucking much.

1. Object oriented programming, complete with inheritance and virtual dispatch

2. Pure Functional Programming, lambdas, const correctness, template metaprogramming

3. Type system fuckery - the things you can do in C++'s TMP is insane. Both nominal and duck typing in the language.

4. Hardware - I watched so many talks on how CPUs work that explained things via C/C++. I learned about tools like valgrind and cachegrind, how to profile code, etc.

5. Security - The original reason I wanted to learn them, to understand how to exploit C and C++ programs and their common vulnerabilities

6. Data structures - C++ is awesome for building data structures from scratch and understanding their low level semantics

I don't want to write them professionally, but learning them was massively helpful, with skills propagating through every other language I've used.

I'm glad someone pointed out these things, as I concur. I learnt C++ via the C++ programming language book, and it gave me many of the above benefits/insights. (The book has its faults though). It is akin to trawling through the CLRS book. It does make you a better programmer but no-one knows why. (An attempt at sarcasm - I know most of us never need to do advanced data structures/algorithms but it helps refine the mind for programming challenges).

7. Fundimental underpinnings - Every other language is written essentially in C - you can often understand how their features WORK if you know C extremely well.

... I'd argue that 1,2 are covered by rust. 3 and 6 by unsafe rust.

Once you have that, a transition to pure C for the full 7 makes sense, and would be trivial for a rust dev.

I'm fairly proficient in Rust and I think it has its own strengths for learning, but its own downsides too.

Pros:

1. Way easier to get "live" help, I've found the barrier to ask for Rust help is lower than any other language I've ever used (and I've used a lot)

2. Way easier tooling like cargo, error messages are far better, especially with regards to generics vs templates

3. Some things are more explicit in Rust. Like `Box<dyn Trait>` is very explicit about dynamic dispatch, I don't recall that being the case in C++.

Cons:

1. Rust's "codex" of knowledge is nowhere near C++. There are tons of conference talks, books, blog posts, etc on C++. Not just on C++ but also on hardware as seen through C++, security, etc.

2. Implementing low level data structures in Rust is an advanced practice. Implementing them in C++ is trivial. I get that it's trivial because C++ doesn't give a fuck about your pointers, but if you're just trying to learn data structures you really just need to be focusing on happy paths and whatnot (as a student).

So idk, at this point I tend to recommend Rust, but I also end up having to link people to talks on C++ sometimes! Herb Sutter and Scott Meyer are amazing speakers and writers and that's a very hard thing to replace.

An accurate summary. I was reflecting exactly your cons when I left gaps in what I said Rust was good for.

Con (1) (Existing examples / training) is a legacy language strength in general, C++ is going to lead in this for a long time.

Con (2) (Low level data structures) I 100% agree. A toy example of a datastructure in C++ is going to be really easy to express but also dangerous to use.

I think you'd really enjoy this chapter of the Rust Docs on making your own Vec https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/vec/vec.html

And you are correct (Con 2 again), it IS an advanced practice. The result of making a data-stucture the rust way is a bulletproof class anyone can use, rather than a C++ foot-gun so it's worth the effort (but less so for learning).

You might find you can make your whole module unsafe and write a very similar data-structure in rust to your C++ solution (pointers and all) and it would compile and run fine.

The big thing to know about rust datastructures is that you need to use unsafe to implement anything cyclic. There is nothing wrong with using unsafe for a few lines of code - just review carefully.

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