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Comment by stephth | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article. And congratulations for the release!

Sorry this is a bit off-topic (and doesn't apply to H2O as it's been in the works for a while looking at the commits), but I wonder, today, with a language like Rust (1.0 is at the door [1]), as performant as its safe C equivalent but modern and safe by design (and with an escape hatch to C/C++ if needed), what would be the advantages of starting a long term project of this type in C today?

[1] http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/12/12/1.0-Timeline.html

Edit: why the downvotes?

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Rust is not even 1.0.

And even if it was, it would take 3-5 years until it gets any decent adoption (if that happens, which remains to be seen). It doesn't even have Go level adoption yet, and Go's adoption is not something to write home about either.

C, people know very well, has tons of tooling, plays well in all platforms and has all the libraries in the world available for it.

> Go's adoption is not something to write home about either.

I wouldn't say so... Go may not be as widespread as other older languages, but the speed at which it's taking over new developments (and sometimes re-writes) can't be glossed over that easily.

Regarding GP's comment, I believe the number 1 argument why that project is started in C is performance. Even nginx, which is also written in C, can't match H2O's speed; I doubt Rust with all the micro-management you can have could beat this level of dedication towards performance.

>I wouldn't say so... Go may not be as widespread as other older languages, but the speed at which it's taking over new developments (and sometimes re-writes) can't be glossed over that easily.

It has a decent following for a new-ish (5 years) language, but the HN echo-chamber makes it seem ever larger than it actually is.

In the general industry it's nearly a statistical error, especially in the enterprise.

> Edit: why the downvotes?

Because under seemingly every C project discussed here someone asks this question or claims that it is "stupid to do something like this in C" and always gets the same answers. Some users might have felt like you were trolling.

I'm writing an HTTP reverse proxy in Rust, and my main gripe so far is that I have to roll my own async I/O. Binding node's HTTP parsers over is going well, but also takes a bunch of effort. Safe-by-design and close to the metal are proving very enjoyable to work with for this, however.

>Edit: why the downvotes?

You could just have easily have asked why it wasn't written in Lisp. It's just not relevant.

Note: Rust 1.0 does not mean feature complete, it means backwards compatible. A lot of the builtin libraries and features (eg compiler plugins) will not be available for use in 1.0 Rust (only in the nightlies)

1.0 Rust gives an option for people wanting to use it in production, and as far as comparing it with C goes it has a lot more functionality, but there is still a long way to go before the "stable" Rust has all the awesomeness that Rust nightlies have right now.

Not relevant to the article "doesn't apply to H2O as it's been in the works for a while looking at the commits"...

I think, it is because language fights are not appreciated so much here.

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