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Re:Ask HN: What is it like to be old? What advice would you ... by neltnerb on Saturday September 19, 2020 @10:12PM (#24531508)
Why are you surprised? I have to write firmware all the time and everyone still uses C unless they're dedicated to another language for some reason. I can see being into Rust. I haven't had any reason to use it yet.
Re:Ask HN: What is it like to be old? What advice would you ... by tasuki on Sunday September 20, 2020 @03:11AM (#24532422)
Memory safety? Isn't that a reason to use Rust over C, that there are some classes of errors one can move from runtime to compile-time?
Re:Ask HN: What is it like to be old? What advice would you ... by neltnerb on Sunday September 20, 2020 @04:50PM (#24537310)
I'm not saying there's no reasons to use Rust over C, but I am saying that I'm not surprised C is still highly valued. I was still being forced to use assembly for firmware a decade after I learned C.

I will not be at all surprised if firmware stays in C until Rust has been practical for use in firmware for several years as well. I don't doubt it'll happen, I haven't written a line of assembly for my firmware in a decade either, but consider how many hundreds of thousands of lines of C there are in the libraries for just one target architecture.

It sounds cool and useful and I'm looking forward to it, but every time I start asking around if Rust is worth the effort the answer from people who use Rust a lot is "not really" because my projects aren't big complex firmware beasts. I am not surprised that a firmware developer with expertise in C can easily find work.

Re:Ask HN: What is it like to be old? What advice would you ... by steveklabnik on Sunday September 20, 2020 @04:55PM (#24537343)
Some of us are working on it ;)
Re:Ask HN: What is it like to be old? What advice would you ... by neltnerb on Sunday September 20, 2020 @04:58PM (#24537370)
Thank you :-D