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Comment by _zagj | Hacker News Reader

It seems obvious that with hardware-level memory safety on the way[1], just gradually modernizing existing C and C++ codebases to take advantage of safer constructs (like smart pointers or checked arithmetic) makes much more sense than rewriting everything in Rust. Even better, thanks to GCC, is that you don't need to sacrifice any portability to take advantage of even bleeding-edge features, due to its front-end/back-end separation and multitude of supported platform back-ends. Fish shell had to drop support for some platforms when it was rewritten in Rust[2].

[1] https://community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Tech-Innovation/open-in...

[2] http://fishshell.com/blog/rustport/

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> Fish shell had to drop support for some platforms when it was rewritten in Rust

Weird misrepresentation of your source... they had to drop support for only the obscurest of platforms, and concluded "We don’t see a big problem here".

Rust has enormous platform support. See https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.htm... for a list. It also has the backend/frontend separation you describe, because it is based on clang internals. There is also ongoing work to plug it into GCC, as well as Rust compilers that can output C code directly to target dead embedded platforms that only have a single proprietary C compiler.

> It seems obvious that with hardware-level memory safety on the way[1], just gradually modernizing existing C and C++ codebases to take advantage of safer constructs (like smart pointers or checked arithmetic) makes much more sense than rewriting everything in Rust

I read this in the opposite way: if the hardware is going to be stricter about memory accesses being valid, that suggests that software is going to have to meet a higher standard in order to successfully run.

Imagine if you had to satisfy the Rust borrow checker, except you're still writing C and don't have additional tooling during compilation to show how a problem could trigger, you just have more crashes.

Ya ever heard of this thing called a debugger? They have this amazing ability to show you what the problem is right when it happens!

Crashes can be difficult to repro, especially if they occur in rare error paths and your software distribution mechanism doesn't yield you in field telemetry. Of course even rust isn't going to catch all issues at compile time (a lot of checks at runtime result in panics), but it does seem to catch many if not most, which is very helpful. This is much like the argument for static typing.

I've used many, debugging both dumps and live processes. And I'll take a compiler that highlights the problem at build time any day.

Hardware level memory safety doesn’t solve bugs caused by the compiler seeing UB in your code and choosing to emit different code than you intended.

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