Re:The Advanced Rust Programming Language Book Draft
by InclinedPlane on Friday July 31, 2015 @12:23AM
(#9979910)
It's all about total systems complexity.
For example, assembly language is very simple. It's basically just arithmetic, comparisons, i/o, and gotos, right? But building systems using assembly results in extremely complex code because it lacks the tools to manage complexity well. You end up with a rats nest of spaghetti code often, for example, unless you use structured programming macros. C++ seems "simple" but it ends up being essentially a "write-your-own-language" language with the way you can use templates, macros, and operator overrides. There's no such thing as one C++ language, there are actually hundreds of dialects that are used by different groups of people for different purposes, almost all of them effectively mutually inoperable with one another. This is a complexity nightmare.
Rust is a systems language, like C/C++, but designed from the ground up and based on modern techniques. For example, there are ways to use C++ which are particularly advantageous from a memory management aspect, such as RAII, but enforcing such uses comes down to culture/policy. Rust instead is based on different principles, specifically the idea of "borrowing", to handle memory management instead of relying on either extreme of "do what you want" or "the GC will clean up after you". There are a ton of other concepts which are baked into the Rust design which result in the ability to create programs that are easier to maintain, more likely to be correct, and more likely to be safe/secure, without sacrificing performance relative to C++ running on bare metal.
For example, assembly language is very simple. It's basically just arithmetic, comparisons, i/o, and gotos, right? But building systems using assembly results in extremely complex code because it lacks the tools to manage complexity well. You end up with a rats nest of spaghetti code often, for example, unless you use structured programming macros. C++ seems "simple" but it ends up being essentially a "write-your-own-language" language with the way you can use templates, macros, and operator overrides. There's no such thing as one C++ language, there are actually hundreds of dialects that are used by different groups of people for different purposes, almost all of them effectively mutually inoperable with one another. This is a complexity nightmare.
Rust is a systems language, like C/C++, but designed from the ground up and based on modern techniques. For example, there are ways to use C++ which are particularly advantageous from a memory management aspect, such as RAII, but enforcing such uses comes down to culture/policy. Rust instead is based on different principles, specifically the idea of "borrowing", to handle memory management instead of relying on either extreme of "do what you want" or "the GC will clean up after you". There are a ton of other concepts which are baked into the Rust design which result in the ability to create programs that are easier to maintain, more likely to be correct, and more likely to be safe/secure, without sacrificing performance relative to C++ running on bare metal.