> I can imagine a situation where a seasoned C or C++ programmer ... make fun of it on the forums
Is this really a thing? Do C folks make fun of Rust?
Is this really a thing? Do C folks make fun of Rust?
Anyone who’s been doing this for long enough is a polyglot.
Reddit gave me some interesting insights into people like this. Whenever I come across a very radical opinion, I check their whole profile. It is often someone without much if any experience, and clearly doing it just for the sake of tribalism.
Because despite its complexity, slow compile times, lack of a specification or more than one viable implementation and bloated binary size, people still tout it as a C replacement.
For application programming, Rust is fine, but for embedded and systems programming, nearly any of those on its own can be enough to eliminate Rust as an option, depending on the situation.
Except for complexity, they are all solvable and being worked on, for this very reason. But Rust can never replace C completely, because it's not simple, and there is a sizeable portion of primarily C programmers who are minimalists.
In this comment I describe what I did to remove the bloat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36394426
It's not the default and it took me some searching and reading to get there. I wonder if Cargo could have some vastly different default per target. As everybody said in this thread, defaults matters.
Hmm, maybe that's the fundamental difference in thinking; the people I'm thinking of would reach for the simplest tool that can feasibly handle the job, even if it's somewhat harder to use.
I am sure a pure assembly implementation would have saved some room in the FLASH, but the generated machine code wasn't that bad for what I can tell with my limited experience anyways. And it sure was nice to write it in Rust. Except a codegen bug in the version of Rust at the time ;) That one was painful!