Hacker News Reader

Comment by yetihehe | Hacker News Reader

Simple | Fast | Safe. Choose two.

Sacrificing safety might have been defensible on a 40 MHz 80386 that could barely run a C++ compiler (I think this is what I started my career on) but today we find eight-core 3.8 GHz CPUs in desktops and dual-core 1.8 GHz SiPs in wristwatches. Safety should have become table stakes a while ago; Moore's Law already paid for it.

Exactly this. It's all about trade-offs. You need to pick the right tool for the job. Sometimes the right tool is dangerous. Knives are dangerous tools, but you need them if you want to cook a meal.

I love one comparison to hole hawg[0] (used for unix vs windows&mac), which is usable here. Memory safe languages are like a fancy electric drill from target. They get the job done, but if you want some more serious drilling they die on you instead of doing something dangerous. C is like one of those drills which are comprised of engine and a handle (cheap, changeable piece of steel pipe). They are designed to do one thing: they rotate a drill. When drill blocks, they rotate you. But when you take appropriate precautions, boy do it drills...

This is from my favourite book: In the beginning was the command line.

[0] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt , search "HOLE HAWG".

So what are you able to do with C that you can’t do in Rust? Somethings are more difficult to pull off, but everything possible in C is possible in Rust. Worst comes to worst you can always drop into unsafe Rust

This “sometimes you need a knife" argument just doesn’t make sense. You can have the power and the safety. Stop cutting off your fingers.

Make a program for 8051 MCU. Or a lot of other microcontrollers.

> This “sometimes you need a knife" argument just doesn’t make sense. You can have the power and the safety. Stop cutting off your fingers.

Sometimes you need a scalpel.

I'm not against Rust. I still want to start a project where Rust will be worth learning for me, but I'm currently busy writing erlang and java for big systems and C for microcontrollers. This is of course only my local situation, I don't advocate for those languages (I love erlang though and I'm wishing for advertised easy concurrency in Rust, maybe someday).

Actually I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Rust on the Arduino! Things are certainly much easier with the large community behind it, I probably would’ve chosen C if there wasn’t an existing community.

I don’t think Rust should be used everywhere, but I’m firm that it could be used anywhere that C can (short of an unsupported architecture).

People overwhelmingly chose Simple and Fast. Still.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com