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A comment on C’s Biggest Mistake (2009). Parent comment

Re:C’s Biggest Mistake (2009) by jkoudys on Saturday September 12, 2020 @10:51PM (#24457838)
One way rust's just a different tool for a different job, is it really doesn't optimize for knowing everything that's happening inside someone else's code. It's a great example of the difference in procedural vs functional programming, where in rust you mostly just care what your function args are and what it returns.

Nothing wrong with learning multiple languages, of course. C was my first professional language, and I spend most of my days in rust now. No shortage of rust devs who are big on C too.

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Re:C’s Biggest Mistake (2009) by johnisgood on Saturday September 12, 2020 @11:07PM (#24457943)
Sure. I code in C, Go, OCaml, Ada/SPARK, Factor (Forth-like, Lisp-y), Common Lisp (rarely), and Erlang (moving to Elixir).

But I was responding to "C code is being replaced by Rust fast.".

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Re:C’s Biggest Mistake (2009) by dnautics on Saturday September 12, 2020 @11:20PM (#24458001)
You might like zig. It's still pre 1.0, but I feel like it really has that "get out of your way" feel of C with a ton of safety. If you write tests, you can get tested memory safety, too.
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Re:C’s Biggest Mistake (2009) by TeaDude on Sunday September 13, 2020 @07:52AM (#24460230)
Zig has a LOT of good stuff going for it but one of my pet peeves is how arsey the linter gets about formatting. No tabs (They might begrudgingly fix that one), no multiline comment/string support (and before anyone tries to correct me on the strings front, you look at that syntax and tell me it isn't an intentional joke), you must use these specific line endings (That one was actually fixed in master recently iirc)

The syntax is also currently REALLY unstable. As in: The hello world has changed almost every major version. Hopefully that too will be squashed with 1.0

To be fair though, Zig is probably the lest egregious and most flexible of the modern "C killers". I can see it's really trying to innovate low level programming. I really like it's flexible malloc systems and support for dynamic linking at runtime. It's compile time code execution is excellent too. The fact that they're actually trying to support obscure platforms like the z80 is a good indicator that they're staying true to C's "code anywhere" mantra. That's why I'm mostly focusing on linting issues of all things.

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Re:C’s Biggest Mistake (2009) by jkoudys on Sunday September 13, 2020 @09:55PM (#24465951)
Ah. If anything, the whole "rust as better than C for everything" thing is starting to hurt its reputation, regardless of veracity. People get so focused on its use in perf-critical applications they ignore its other strengths. eg I've never replaced C code with it, but we redid our whole PHP backend as a rust app, because it's great for rigidly defined business rules too.
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Re:C’s Biggest Mistake (2009) by jkoudys on Sunday September 13, 2020 @09:54PM (#24465944)
Ah. If anything, the whole "rust as better than C for everything" thing is starting to hurt its reputation, regardless of veracity. People get so focused on its use in perf-critical applications they ignore its other strengths. eg I've never replaced C code with it, but we redid our whole PHP backend as a rust app.
[ Parent | on HN ]