For tooling, I can context switch out of C++ which does have boost, into [rust, go, python… etc] and deal with that switch, or just be lazy and write it in C++. I’ve tried to write three tools in Rust so far, and the pain of not having a good stdlib, of essentially searching the internet for a blog post that solves my issue then finding the blog post was written by one dev 4 years ago to pump up their library that was written 4 years ago and then never supported after that… it’s a bit exhausting.
Again, before ya’ll attack. This is from the perspective of a willing, excited customer. I want to use Rust at work and advocate for it. Just saying, it’s not easy in the state it’s in.
C-410 from Qualcomm, which is a whole different world, I can’t even look at the source code.
But when it works, wow. This has been the most fun embedded project I've ever done with the least debugging.
Edit:spelling
It’s all beta software, but here is what they list in the docs:
Services like Wi-Fi, HTTP client/server, MQTT, OTA updates, logging etc. are exposed via Espressif's open source IoT Development Framework, ESP-IDF. It is mostly written in C and as such is exposed to Rust in the canonical split crate style:
a sys crate to provide the actual unsafe bindings (esp-idf-sys) a higher level crate offering safe and comfortable Rust abstractions (esp-idf-svc) The final piece of the puzzle is low-level hardware access, which is again provided in a split fashion:
esp-idf-hal implements the hardware-independent embedded-hal traits like analog/digital conversion, digital I/O pins, or SPI communication - as the name suggests, it also uses ESP-IDF as a foundation if direct register manipulation is required, esp32c3 provides the peripheral access crate generated by svd2rust. More information is available in the ecosystem chapter of The Rust on ESP Book.
> The set of reasons to start a new project in C/C++ are few and the list is shrinking by the day.
That'd be true if every project started from scratch with only the language standard library. And yet..... almost any project you start is going to be dependent on a large chunk of code you didn't write, even on greenfield projects.
I think this is true, and I'd refine my original statement accordingly. My original comment was thinking more from first principles, not as much about pragmatic considerations of ecosystem support.
If we were to disregard the momentum of existing ecosystems, I think C/C++ would be niche choices today: very important for certain, focused use cases, but not meant for the masses. Taking into account the momentum of existing ecosystems however, they still play a large role in many domains.
I have a couple of languages in my belt C, C++, Go, Python, Java are the primary ones. C and C++ are reserved for "power use". For power use, I mean scientific, HPC stuff or any code I need the full capacity of the processor.
To get that, sometimes you need -ffmast-math, sometimes said undefined behavior, or code patterns which translate to better code for the processor you target.
Rust doesn't allow any of that, moreover limits me the way I can write my programs, no thanks.
For security-sensitive compiled code, I can use Rust, but I can't use Rust anywhere, and everywhere. It also has its niche, and it can't and won't replace C or C++ at the end of the day. It'll get its slice (which might be sizeable), a couple of compiler implementations, and will evolve to become another mainstream , boring language, which is good.
Also, if you give half an effort, C++ is pretty secure and robust to begin with, esp. on the pointers department. Just be mindful, and run a couple of valgrind tests on your code, and you're set. Been there, done that.
> Just be mindful, and run a couple of valgrind tests on your code, and you're set.
Thousands of severe CVEs every year attest to the effectiveness of that mindset. "Just git gud" is not a meaningful thing to say, as even experienced devs routinely make exploitable (and other) mistakes.
In the tests, it became evident that the speed of the code is limited by the memory bandwidth of the system, yet for the processors I work with that limit is also very near to practical performance limit of the FPUs, as well. I could have squeezed a bit more performance by reordering the matrices to abuse prefetcher better, but it was good enough and I had no time.
Well, the method I verify the said codebase is here [0]. Also, if BSD guys can write secure code with C, everybody can. I think their buffer overflow error count is still <10 after all these years.
That’s a bold claim to make without evidence. Things like that totally seem doable in Rust without a lot of ceremony. You might have to launder some lifetimes through unsafe if you can’t convince the compiler statically, but that’s not that hard.
> Also, if BSD guys can write secure code with C, everybody can. I think their buffer overflow error count is still <10 after all these years.
As was the problem with Linux enthusiasts claiming Linux was safer bedside fewer CVEs, BSD similarly benefits from having almost no attention paid to it + very few core developers so the feature growth rate is minimal. I don’t but the claim that BSD’s qualities extrapolate anywhere rather than a more mundane explanation or that BSD is the exception that proves the role somehow given no other successful project seems to be able to do the same.
> I don’t but the claim that BSD’s qualities extrapolate anywhere rather than a more mundane explanation or that BSD is the exception that proves the role somehow given no other successful project seems to be able to do the same.
It's mostly about "it's done when it's done" mentality and always putting the discipline before writing code fast. It's a vastly different mentality when compared to modern, conventional software development. This mentality also makes what Debian is Debian.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the stressed solo developer syndrome, which brings us OpenSSL with its all problems and grievances.
Why? Can you be more specific? Rust has built-in support for atomics and essentially the same memory model as C++, e.g.:
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/atomic/struct.AtomicU32.h...
And you can sidestep essentially any requirements of normal Rust using an `UnsafeCell` (e.g. that's how mutexes are implemented, with an `UnsafeCell` holding the data and an atomic).
I've written my share of lockless algorithms and I haven't really noticed any deficiency compared to C++, but then, I'm not an expert in this area, so if there is a deficiency here I'd love to hear about it.
> Rust doesn't allow any of that, moreover limits me the way I can write my programs, no thanks.
I'm willing to prove you wrong here. Can you give some concrete examples?
For -ffast-math you can most certainly enable it, but AFAIK for now only in a localized fashion through intrinsics, e.g.:
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/intrinsics/fn.fadd_fast.html
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/intrinsics/fn.fmul_fast.html
So instead of doing this the dumb way and enabling -ffast-math for the whole program (which most certainly won't need it) you can profile where you're spending the majority of your time, and only do this where it'll matter, and without the possibility of randomly breaking the rest of your numeric code.
Personally I find this to be a vastly better approach.
> So instead of doing this the dumb way and enabling -ffast-math for the whole program (which most certainly won't need it)...
When you write HPC enabled simulation code, you certainly need it, and this is where I use it.
Every piece of code you write is security-sensitive. IMO It is our professional responsibility to our users that we treat it that way.
For a vast majority of situations, even if you know what you are doing, you are human and therefore will make mistakes.
If the (probably) most heavily invested C++ codebase, Chrome, has memory use-after-free/overflow bugs, there is no way that truly safe C++ can be written at any product-scale.
No, not every application is CRUD, not every application is interactive and no, not every application serves users and communicate with outside world in a way allowing to be abused during its lifetime.
This doesn't mean it gives me the freedom to write reckless code all over, but the security model of an authentication module and a mathematical simulation is vastly different.
> there is no way that truly safe C++ can be written at any product-scale.
I agree to disagree here, because of my own experience.
Simulation precision and accuracy already carries tons of liability.
Talking like I or we don’t care about consequences is disturbing, esp. with the experience you have.
Any cybersecurity law that requires citzens votes for adoption, will certainly get my signature.
All this is done for a code which has no network access, no kernel level work, even doesn’t accept any input after parsing the input model and making sure that it’s well formed with no loose ends.
Imagine what I’d do if it does any kind of authentication or user affecting work.
We all agree that security is important and a lot of code running in security-sensitive contexts is bad. That's very different from saying that all code is security-sensitive.
Who sold you that notion?
Matlab is proprietary glue holding together modules written in Fortran, C, C++, Java that allows the adhoc inclusion of DLLS put together by graduate students on the fly.
In what universe is any of that "memory safe"?
Like the matrix handling, plotting, and other modules dragged in from the 1990s standard FORTRAN library era.
Don't get me wrong, I have placed a lot of trust in those kinds of numeric libraries since the 1980s - NIST and other national labs code and review to a high standard - but they weren't then and aren't now "memory safe" just very probably and mostly bug free.
Unless they were, say, rewritten in Java .. and that's a whole other big ball of issues .. translated code.
I'm happy to play along and agree that the JIT compiled 'Matlab language' parts of Matlab are memory safe - but to the best of my experience with past versions that's just the glue portions - the reason so many people use Matlab is for the chunks that get glued together.
They can still have bugs, memory issues, be called with parameters that cause resource blow outs and aren't "memory safe" in the sense that modern managed languages are.
Matlab is exactly as reliable as well written Fortran and C code can be.
There isn't really any fundamental limitation of Rust for those situations. A better reason why C++ is better than Rust for compute is the support for OpenACC, OpenCL, OpenMP, CUDA, ROCm/HIP, etc.
Also, if you give half an effort, C++ is pretty secure and robust to begin with, esp. on the pointers department.
The problem is that even if a "Safe" C++ could be defined, it would need to interoperate with the rest of the "Unsafe" C++ world. Perhaps a programmer can write absolutely safe C++ themselves but all bets are off once you're working with other programmers.
Just be mindful, and run a couple of valgrind tests on your code, and you're set. Been there, done that.
Seriously? A "couple of valgrind tests" would be insufficient for catching all but the most trivial and/or blatant memory safety issues in C++, especially when dealing with malicious users. Although I agree that dynamic analysis like valgrind and sanitizers should be the default for C++ development, industrial grade static analysis tools are at least as important. And needless to say, if you find Rust complains about code too much then just wait for what static analysis tooling will complain about.
If programming is a team sport, every team player should be up to the level your project needs. If they are not, they should raise their bars. Seriously.
Yes, seriously, be mindful. Implement allocation and destruction first, fill your code between these two steps.
A couple of Valgrind tests is actually a whole procedure. It's an unfortunate downplay by me [0], probably because I'm very used to use Valgrind as a second nature.
Also, this elitist notion of raising the bar is an instant “turnoff” for me, with all due respect, I can only assume from that that the given person may not be as much an expert as they think of themselves. Not saying that it applies to you as well, but you don’t leave me much other choice.
Ad absurdum it has quite great inline asm support.
I like rust and I dick around with it a bit on some small REST projects I have for home automation but for day-to-day work I stick with c++ until rust support picks up in the industry a lot more than it currently is.
Why do you think Bjarne Stroustoup main subject on conferences is how to write C++ properly without C style coding, for several years now?
The set of reasons to start a new project in C/C++ are few and the list is shrinking by the day.