Re:Why did we choose Rust to develop TiKV?
by wyldfire on Wednesday September 27, 2017 @10:40AM
(#15348214)
When I look at Rust it seems to me to be very much C-inspired syntax. The code-blocks-return-a-value style makes it much easier to understand some conditional paths.
"Why would Rust change the syntax to say the same stuff?" Well, Rust is able to meet all of C's requirements while addressing one of C's big old warts: lexical analysis of C code is Very Hard. (e.g. if this particular build added "-DFOO" or "-Ibar/" to the command line then maybe there's a syntactical error or not).
This means that writing robust tools to analyze or modify C code is Very Hard. I don't know if this was an inspiration for Rust's syntax but regardless I'm thankful that they didn't try to reuse C syntax.
Most other successors to C (save perhaps C++) have taken on features that make them unable to write code that we have been able to write in C (bootloaders, OS kernels, interrupt routines, device drivers, etc). Teams had a really legitimate and mostly sane reason most of the time for saying "we couldn't possibly consider Java/Go/Python/etc because we won't be able to meet our product's latency requirements."
"Why would Rust change the syntax to say the same stuff?" Well, Rust is able to meet all of C's requirements while addressing one of C's big old warts: lexical analysis of C code is Very Hard. (e.g. if this particular build added "-DFOO" or "-Ibar/" to the command line then maybe there's a syntactical error or not).
This means that writing robust tools to analyze or modify C code is Very Hard. I don't know if this was an inspiration for Rust's syntax but regardless I'm thankful that they didn't try to reuse C syntax.
Most other successors to C (save perhaps C++) have taken on features that make them unable to write code that we have been able to write in C (bootloaders, OS kernels, interrupt routines, device drivers, etc). Teams had a really legitimate and mostly sane reason most of the time for saying "we couldn't possibly consider Java/Go/Python/etc because we won't be able to meet our product's latency requirements."