Rust is the future, C is the new Assembly: Josh Triplett (Intel)

Re:Rust is the future, C is the new Assembly: Josh Triplett ... by _bxg1 on Wednesday August 28, 2019 @12:43PM (#20821450)

It's not that hard, it just brings very unfamiliar ideas to the table. If you've used a bunch of different languages, most other languages can be picked up pretty quickly by combining different aspects you're familiar with from the ones you know.

That's not the case for Rust. It takes a few solid weeks of feeling stupid until you really start to grasp borrowing, and that experience may feel offensive to people who are used to knowing what they're doing, but a few weeks really isn't that much time in the grand scheme of things.

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Re:Rust is the future, C is the new Assembly: Josh Triplett ... by ChrisSD on Wednesday August 28, 2019 @01:01PM (#20821648)

Hmm... I'm not so sure the ideas themselves are unfamiliar. Any one who has used C or C++ has to deal with lifetimes (or at least should) and things like iterators are a very common pattern nowadays.

What Rust does differently is making ownership and unique/shared references a central feature of the language in a way that is amenable to static analysis. Obviously this is often a struggle for programmers to get used to, there's no denying that, but I don't think it's the concepts themselves that are unfamiliar. Unless of course the programmer is new to low level languages.

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Re:Rust is the future, C is the new Assembly: Josh Triplett ... by _bxg1 on Thursday August 29, 2019 @10:53AM (#20830018)

I used C++ for 4 years before trying Rust and I still felt like 50% of the latter was completely new. There's a huge difference between understanding how to manage memory and understanding how to satisfy the borrow-checker. Certain things - sometimes legitimate things! - that you could do normally are simply not allowed, because they can't be proven to be correct.

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