Not Being Swayed to Write in Rust (Yet)

I've enjoyed learning how to make performant software, and I've been led to some fantastic toolkits for C++. Some of my favourites include Qt and Boost. Unfortunately, it seems like no amount of pointer container classes, design patterns or static checkers are going to make modern C++ any safer. I don't want to abandon the ship and shift to a garbage collected languages, although they do come in handy, especially Java, as I've used it with ANTLR for testing grammars. These frameworks seem to complement each other nicely, and some scripting in JavaScript is handy for wrangling data as well. I find Rust cumbersome, with regards to naming styles, and error handling. I like the conveniences of the package and toolchain management rolled with Rust, but they aren't enough to sway me from C++. I would like something like the borrow checker being available in C++, and say, MSVC or GCC having more user-friendly compiler error messages. Maybe C++ is too slow to adapt, and Rust will take its place, if comparable frameworks become more popular. Competition is good for innovation anyway. Regards, Ben

On Wed, 13 Dec 2023 04:12:33 +0000, Ben Cottrell wrote:
I don't want to abandon the ship and shift to a garbage collected languages, although they do come in handy, especially Java ...
ORC (e.g. Perl, Python) > GC (e.g. Java).
Maybe C++ is too slow to adapt, and Rust will take its place ...
There are other efforts towards safer languages. Such as Google’s “Carbon” project <https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang>, which looks like “C++ done right” (i.e. keep the good bits, drop the old cruft). And then there is SPARK <https://devclass.com/2022/11/08/spark-as-good-as-rust-for-safer-coding-adacore-cites-nvidia-case-study/>, which is a subset of Ada designed so that programs can be proven error-free. Ada itself has a long pedigree in safety-critical programming, going back to its commissioning by the US Department of Defense in the 1980s. For example, the life support systems on the International Space Station are written in Ada.
participants (2)
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Ben Cottrell
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro