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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

> It's already frozen and the replacement is already there. It's Rust. (Yes there are other competitors, but unless a large shift happens, Rust has won¹´⁴.)

Call me when I can integrate Rust into my build system without Cargo. Or when the Rust standard libary handles out of memory correctly. Or when compile times are within a factor of 2 of C. Or when debug mode isn't an order of magnitude or more slower to execute. Or ...

Rust ain't gonna displace C any time soon. For C++, you might have a better argument.

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Rust is suitable to replace C in some (nontrivial) percentage of cases right now, and that percentage will likely/hopefully increase over time. I agree integrating with existing C build systems is a sore point (in fact my largest personal grievance against Rust — tied to it's very annoying 'modern' habit of "everything brings its own package manager"). But for the time being I don't see any signs of design decisions that would permanently hamper Rust.

That said, I think some of your expectations are rather personal to you with limited objective merit: the Linux kernel Rust people seem to be happy to use Rust without its stdlib to get the panic-freedom they need, and compile times being slower is something that needs to be weighted against the safety guarantees you get in exchange. Rust intrinsically warns/errors on a lot of things that with C you need a static analysis build for — and if you compare build time against C+SA, it's actually not slow.

Rust ain't gonna displace C any time soon. For C++, you might have a better argument.

Incrementally replacing C code with Rust is far, far easier than C++. For instance, passing null-terminated strings to Rust code is quite straightforward, whereas a std::string absolutely is not.

C will live for a very long time, but C++ will live even longer. Maybe that sounds absurd, but the fact is that every major C compiler is written in C++, and the rest of the toolchain is moving that direction if it isn't already there.

> Incrementally replacing C code with Rust is far, far easier than C++.

And yet other languages manage to do that far better than Rust.

Interfacing to C from Zig is both pleasant and straightforward, for example.

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