Re:Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity
by pjmlp on Monday October 30, 2017 @08:51AM
(#15584604)
Most of the FOSS software originated with the UNIX culture, where C thrives and the original FSF Manifesto suggested using only C to increase portability between POSIX systems.
So the historical accident was UNIX/POSIX taking over the majority of OS architectures.
Re:Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity
by cies on Monday October 30, 2017 @03:00PM
(#15587895)
> I think it is sad that people, looking at these aging and unaudited C codebases, are thinking about rewriting them in Rust, when rewriting them in e.g. Python might make better sense.
I agree... apart from the Python bit. :) When deving software that is very big (LOC) or very widely distributed (FLOSS packages), then I prefer "well typed" languages that do not need a VM/interpreter.
Re:Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity
by scott_karana on Monday October 30, 2017 @08:33PM
(#15590249)
But Rust is linker compatible with C and C++, meaning the typesafe rewrites can also be shoehorned into Python, just like its native extensions in C are...
There are a lot of projects that really could be written in a high-level language, but they were started when C was still preferable due to the immaturity of higher-level solutions. I think it is sad that people, looking at these aging and unaudited C codebases, are thinking about rewriting them in Rust, when rewriting them in e.g. Python might make better sense. Very little Free Software needs to be so close to the metal, and it was just a historical accident that we got so much written in C.