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Comment by causal | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of silly to me. You don't have to break up with Rust to use C++.

Look for opportunities to adopt Rust, especially greenfield projects. We don't have to eliminate all C++ codebases first.

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Exactly. VSCode and Chrome already have Rust code, although only a very small part. But if giant, complex projects like these can find places where Rust fits, most other projects can as well.

Android, Windows, Discord, Dropbox, Cloudflare, AWS

Pluton firmware, Azure network cards firmware, new Azure Sphere SDK.

maybe you can only fit one really complex language in your head at a time while watching out for footguns

Then use a language with fewer footguns?

But that's not a problem with Rust, and it's not something that anyone should feel ashamed about. Just acknowledge "Hey I can't use Rust because I can't commit the brain space needed to it".

This and also what people don't realize is that because right now Rust is a passion project for most people almost everything in it is of very high quality.

Jobs will come soon because stability and speed is good for business. And then we will have a bunch of lower quality stuff but more jobs. So enjoy the good things at each stage.

I agree with your take and want to add that Rust has stellar tooling and code analysis of it also looks either easier or just more people are doing it so I think linting and semi-automatically applying better practices will be easier compared to, say, Python.

Absolutely. It is a better designed language by far.

Aside: I've been programming for... 35 years or so by my reckoning, but I can't recall ever hearing the term "greenfield project" before this year, and now it's seemingly everywhere. What's up with that? What happened to just... making new things?

It's probably the circles you are around. The term has been around for a long time.

Been around programming for ~20 years, professionally engineering for 13 of them, and I think I first heard the term (and have heard it consistently since then) at least a decade ago.

Rejoice! You are one of today's Lucky 10,000[0]!

[0] https://xkcd.com/1053/

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=g...

Google trends only go back to 2004, but it's older than that.

Of course greenfield has been a term for a long time, but how long has it been used to describe software projects? I'd think a lot less than that.

Wait til you learn about "brownfield" projects, which apparently is also a thing! (It's the opposite of greenfield)

I've used the term "greenfield development" for 10 years and I'm not even a native speaker. Though I have been on this site longer than that, so I might have picked that up by osmosis.

Ime you kind of do, at least did. I learned rust twice I think. First time it had a lot of time hype so I sat down and learned it. Then kind of like this rant never used it so it forgot it.

Then it came up at work and the language changed enough that I had to learn it again. Features were added, the "community approved" libraries changed, tools changed, coding conventions changed.

I never had that feeling with any other language I've used in similar ways. Javascript, ruby, python go I always felt like I could learn, stop using and come back to use pretty easily.

I have difficulty picking Rust again for semi-different reasons than yours: it simply has a huge surface, not only the core language but also the libraries; the amount of those you really must know to be able to call yourself a commercial Rust programmer seems to grow with time. (You mentioned this last point, hence the "semi-different reasons" expression.)

I know Rust quite fine as a language but put me in a commercial project and I'll definitely need a few weeks to learn what should be used for i.e. error handling, logging, OpenTelemetry, and such.

That's odd! Finding libraries (crates) has been the easy part for me. You usually get the answer directly from crates.io. Even in cases where there are multiple alternatives, it's easy to choose one based on the statistics available on crates.io. And in the rare case where you still can't decide, a web search reveals the frontrunner with detailed articles on why.

Oh, I'm not saying it's difficult. I'm saying that at one point it becomes too much. And if I don't actively work with Rust I end up forgetting and having to relearn in the future.

How is it different from the situation in other languages? Especially the ones like C and C++ that don't have a canonical source registry either? (Not a rhetorical question)

Normally yes but f.ex. my favorite Elixir has a community that very strongly prefers and orbits around singular solutions of thorny problems. You will not find many ORMs / DataMappers in that ecosystem, it's one that has been super hard worked on and nearly everyone accepts it and loves it and contributes to it when the need arises.

Meanwhile in many other languages, Golang and Rust included, there are many ways to do the same thing. That introduces difficulty to keep well up to date.

But I can easily agree this point gets very weakened after you have worked with the language for a certain amount of time and on.

Could you share links to the libraries that you have used?

C++ has changed a lot.

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