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A comment on Fish (shell) porting to Rust from C++. Parent comment

Re:Fish (shell) porting to Rust from C++ by cmrdporcupine on Monday January 30, 2023 @09:28PM (#34590098)
Yeah, it's insane. You're not alone. I have had a career working in C++, but also love Rust and was paid to work in it for a while. But most people in the industry I casually talk to -- who aren't a particular kind of open source or language nerd etc. -- have barely even heard of Rust.

There's no way it's legacy.

Rust might attract new devs to the project, sure. But at the same time, quality software mature developers work diligently with the tools and frameworks they have and improve things iteratively rather than trying to burn down and rebuild everything.

And rewrites in general, no matter the language, are on the whole dangerous and harmful ventures that usually lead to trouble. As per the classic Spolsky essay.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Fish (shell) porting to Rust from C++ by pkulak on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @01:17AM (#34591884)
They do say it’s more of a port than a rewrite. They aren’t trying to do everything a new way this time around. That’s usually the downfall of a rewrite.

I’ve done these kinds of ports before. After you get used to it, you can almost shut your brain off and just start copying lines (so long as the languages are similar).

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Re:Fish (shell) porting to Rust from C++ by lifthrasiir on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @03:04AM (#34592565)
> But most people in the industry I casually talk to -- who aren't a particular kind of open source or language nerd etc. -- have barely even heard of Rust. There's no way it's legacy.

While Rust is still too young to make C++ a legacy alone, the transition has been long underway. "Scripting" languages, managed language runtimes, and a popularity of web development has greatly reduced needs for C++. Nowadays no one writes a web server in C++ [1], not because it is not performant enough for its job, but because other languages are better suited to provide a tradeoff between development experience and performance. C++ will continue to have lots of niches for coming decades, but is already a legacy in many enough fields.

[1] Well, not really! First and foremost I have written a C++ web server as late as in 2016. But we needed a very good reason to do so, and any further logic was delegated to C#.

[ Parent | on HN ]