Re:The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
by steveklabnik on Thursday April 23, 2015 @09:40AM
(#9426562)
22 days till 1.0...
> as performant as C++
LLVM helps a lot here. We're generally in the same order of magnitude, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. It depends, as always with performance.
> comparible number of libraries
Yeah, this is a big one. If those C++ libraries also expose a C interface, we have zero-overhead FFI, but not all of them do. Crates.io currently has 1,893 packages, with a million and a half downloads served so far. It's a start, but always a weakness of a young language.
> platform support
LLVM helps here too, though there will always be some embedded platforms and such that ship their own C or C++ compiler.
But Rust also introduces complexity, while improving substantially in many areas. Of course it will do things better than what a language initially designed decades ago will do. A large amount of important systems rely on C++ and so it cannot change overnight, if at all. Rust on the other hand is free to experiment. The cost, at least in this early period, is unreliability.
When, or if, Rust becomes as performant as C++, with a comparable number of libraries and platform support, then it will be a viable alternative (and I hope that day comes). For now, the only possibility for this use case is C++.