Re:Show HN: RustyBox – a Busybox fork written in Rust
by Matthias247 on Thursday November 14, 2019 @07:54PM
(#21541267)
> Rust is going to take credibility hits if more people do this
I disagree on that. Rust also took a credibility hit for people advertising exactly the opposite: To rewrite things from scratch. While that approach certainly helps with getting idiomatic code right from the start, years of feature development will get lost, and the chances for introducing non memory related bugs are still there.
The ability to transfer a project to Rust in 1 step, and then to gradually improve it seems like a big plus to me. Of course it would not be great if projects are just auto-translated and then kept that way. But I don't think that is the intention of most authors who do that.
I disagree on that. Rust also took a credibility hit for people advertising exactly the opposite: To rewrite things from scratch. While that approach certainly helps with getting idiomatic code right from the start, years of feature development will get lost, and the chances for introducing non memory related bugs are still there.
The ability to transfer a project to Rust in 1 step, and then to gradually improve it seems like a big plus to me. Of course it would not be great if projects are just auto-translated and then kept that way. But I don't think that is the intention of most authors who do that.