But Rust builds on top of that 50 years of experience, stability and known issues and has solved a lot of them. What does C have to offer that Rust doesn't?
I don't think it's fair to blame the issues that code written in C can have on incompetence.
I don't think it's fair to blame the issues that code written in C can have on incompetence.
Is it? Rewrites only succeed if the original people rewrite the original code, because code is just a serialization of someone's thoughts. That's why it's the people who are the most important assets in a project, not the code. When the original people leave, projects typically fail.
Rust is not being written by the same people who made GCC. It's a different group of people who are trying to do better than C. I wish them best of luck, but to say that they're "building on top of 50 years of experience" is implying that the software they generate is as good as software that has been battle tested for decades on numerous architectures.
> I don't think it's fair to blame the issues that code written in C can have on incompetence.
It's not a blaming game. Code written in C has issues because C has issues, but are you then saying that Rust has no issues? Will never have any issues? What's the bar here?
Rust eliminates an entire class of issues that constitute 70% of C bugs (and largely the most critical bugs at that) by design. Nobody's saying Rust has no issues and never will, but they are saying that this is an objective improvement.
Ok, so we agree that Rust must have some issues, some of them undiscovered yet. What suggests that Rust won't introduce issues that will be larger than the 70% of issues that it solves with C? Because to me, it just sounds like we can't know so we're being hopeful that we don't run into that situation.
Rust was released 12 years ago.
For a given value of "issues," that's an accurate portrayal. Statically verified memory safety at the language level is a central part of Rust's mission statement. This is an essential difference from C in how it approaches that problem space. Rust might "have issues" in the sense that compiler bugs are exposed by particular edge cases, or that dealing with certain problems is needlessly difficult or verbose, but reducing everything to "issues" to portray it as equivalent to C is absurd. You might as well say they both have "syntax" and conclude that all code written in Rust is still written in C.