Let’s sunset C/C++

Re:Let’s sunset C/C++ by DCKing on Friday August 14, 2015 @08:03AM (#10059684)

I don't understand this type of reaction every time the problems of C/C++ are highlighted. Yes, of course the problems can be migitated using tools, but clearly this is not being done or is not as thorough or practical a solution as making it the language's responsibility. There's hoops that you must jump through to make C/C++ safe and clearly this just doesn't happen in practice. The same hoops just don't exist for Go and Rust (and that's just the system(ish) programming languages) and therefore I disagree that you can handwave this away as bullshit.

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Re:Let’s sunset C/C++ by flohofwoe on Friday August 14, 2015 @08:18AM (#10059721)

Rust is the right approach since it figures everything out at compile time. But it still has to prove itself. And what is the timeline for a browser completely re-implemented in Rust? 5 years? 10 years? Suggesting that throwing away and rewriting our entire software foundation that has been written in the past 50 years is just silly. To be realistically achievable we need an incremental approach to gradually analyze and fix old software instead of throw-away-and-rewrite.

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Re:Let’s sunset C/C++ by steveklabnik on Friday August 14, 2015 @11:00AM (#10060441)

Luckily, with Rust's great FFI, it's easy to peel off a component and re-write it, you don't need to do the whole thing. It's not like Firefox is getting transpiled to Rust tomorrow, we're just replacing bits and pieces, slowly.

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Re:Let’s sunset C/C++ by iofj on Sunday August 16, 2015 @08:02AM (#10068682)

Well the time will come when you will realize that

1) every language has hoops to jump through to make them safe (e.g. garbage collection does not protect you from memory leaks) [1]

2) every 4-5 years or so someone comes out with a programming language/system* [2] (rust, go at the moment) that fixes it all and "encourages good practices" - and then the good practices change (e.g. microservices are making their second round. They're good for sysadmins/sres and very bad for programmers (because you have to serialize/deserialize everything and changes to the system propagate into potentially dozens of separate programs - and God help you if they're maintained by different departments)). I wonder what's next ? Data-oriented programming is the perfect solution for the problems of microservices, so that could be next I guess.

* they may call it programming language, they may call it a system. Of course, it's always both.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydWFpcoYraU [2] Forth, C, COBOL (/mainframes), Pascal, C++, Oberon vs Modula-2, dBase (and it's competitors), Object Pascal/VB (the built-in database approach), Perl, Java, .Net, and now here Go/Rust

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