Ask Slashdot: Is it Practical To Replace C With Rust? 437
interval1066 writes: I've heard of rust from various sources around the net for a few years and never paid it much mind, there are so many new languages out now since my early days doing C programming, which what I've stuck to and made me my career. Now I'm heading a project that uses a RoR application to control a large series of sensors and controls in a manufacturing process. Naturally I want to talk to the hardware using a GEM extension written in C, as I've done before.
But another engineer who is not a fan of C (seems few younger engineers are) said he could write the extensions needed easily in Rust. Seems like this is a thing. I took a closer look at rust and it looks to me like another attempt at "C" without pointers, except rust does have a kind of pointer, it appears. I like its ranking on a list of fastest languages, and it seems pretty simple with an initial tool footprint that is quite small.
But what are the trade offs? Another language, and one that few engineers know (much like Vala, which I like very much but has the same small user base). What if I need another engineer to work on the code? I pretty much know what I can expect from C/C++, rust is a huge unknown, what if I run onto a roadblock? The engineer pushing for rust is emphatic, should I bulldoze him or take the plunge?
But another engineer who is not a fan of C (seems few younger engineers are) said he could write the extensions needed easily in Rust. Seems like this is a thing. I took a closer look at rust and it looks to me like another attempt at "C" without pointers, except rust does have a kind of pointer, it appears. I like its ranking on a list of fastest languages, and it seems pretty simple with an initial tool footprint that is quite small.
But what are the trade offs? Another language, and one that few engineers know (much like Vala, which I like very much but has the same small user base). What if I need another engineer to work on the code? I pretty much know what I can expect from C/C++, rust is a huge unknown, what if I run onto a roadblock? The engineer pushing for rust is emphatic, should I bulldoze him or take the plunge?
You know the old saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You know the old saying... (Score:5, Funny)
No one ever got fired for using C.
Someone at Volkswagen might.
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I thought Bosch wrote that code and told WV not to use it like that. Anyway, it's probably written in Simulink.
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I know that's a joke, but it's of course nonsense. Plenty of people have gotten fired for using C, especially when their code had dangerous security vulnerabilities (which it ALWAYS does).
Re:You know the old saying... (Score:4, Insightful)
I know that's a joke, but it's of course nonsense. Plenty of people have gotten fired for using C, especially when their code had dangerous security vulnerabilities (which it ALWAYS does).
Wrong.
Yes, people have been fired for being bad programmers. I doubt many have been fired over security vulnerabilities, most likely because either (a) the vulnerability was discovered after the programmer already voluntarily left or (b) was rooted in standard operating procedures (e.g you just don't do that) - most due to people not realizing the consequences of network computers. (Prior to networking, security didn't really matter too much outside of specialized environments.)
Further more, C-based software probably runs about 99+% of devices out there - most notably everyone's favorite OS kernel - Linux - is entirely written in C, as is the Windows NT Kernel, the BSD Kernels, etc. Most all operating systems use it at the core, and many applications use it - IOW, the world runs on C; aside from Assembly is it probably the most used programming language out there when you look at all aspects of software (even C++ doesn't compare). It only bites you if, like with any tool (including Java), you mis-use it. Best practices will save you from 99.99% of issues.
Oh, and the OS's that don't use C in their kernel? They're all research or hobby stuff that more or less proves you could do it, but the performance is so abysmal (compared to the same thing in C) that no one would really use it, or they use C to bootstrap and load into their alternative language - typical of C++ OS Kernels. (Yes, there have been Java-based Operating Systems; they also relied on specialized hardware-based JVMs and no one uses them outside of small research projects.)
Re:You know the old saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
That phrase has also been used for heyday IBM and Microsoft. But both sucked.
Sometimes you have to choose between money and sanity.
It used to be true of IBM -- as long as you were willing to pay, you could get near perfect uptime and nearly unlimited scalability. But you definitely had to pay for it -- we had a dedicated IBM service rep with an office in our data center, that sort of service doesn't come cheap. But we had no significant downtime in my 4 years there. Sure we had some jobs fail here or there due to DASD failures, but the core mainframe never had a hiccup and we completed several online hardware upgrades with no downtime.
Of course, I can get even better scalability and uptime with a distributed system (geographically distributed) on commodity hardware today, but that wasn't always a viable option.
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So you spent 5 hours of your time, and 5 hours of tech support time, to avoid the data entry clerk spending 6 hours simply rekeying the data? Why? Doesn't sound like the right choice, unless the clerk had gone home already or something.
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Reminds me of the time the owner and his wannabe tech friend were poking around the IT closet one night, and mysteriously, our payments database crashed, corrupted, and unrecoverable. I spent all night trying to restore the previous days receipts. Hell, I even tried a hex editor to get something, anything. The file was complete garbage. Probably $100K unaccounted for, I was thinking the bank and investors are not going to like that, the company may be toast.
The next morning, I told the accounting boss (owne
Re:You know the old saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You know the old saying... (Score:4, Insightful)
It think it's safe to say that C as a language is optimized for speed, size, and hardware issues instead of software engineering issues.
Re:You know the old saying... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:You know the old saying... (Score:5, Informative)
It takes work to write safe code in C.
Same with Java and even Ruby - Null refs, running out of mem, not closing database connections, etc - things that also characteristics of unsafe code. I've done the lot of it, C, C++, Assembly, Java, Python, what have you. For e-commerce as well as low level stuff.
And I've seen unsafe code written in all of them. Treating pointers as ohhh-chupacabara! is just ridiculous. People who program with discipline avoid those problems, whether they program in C or Python or what have you.
Your worst developers will use uninitialized variables, pointers to previously freed memory, and overflow buffers. But not in Rust.
Don't worry. Your worst developers will find ways to create unsafe code in Rust in one way or another.
Re:You know the old saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
That phrase has also been used for heyday IBM and Microsoft. But both sucked.
Heydey IBM didn't suck. You whippersnappers just don't appreciate what we had to do on mainframes to lay the groundwork for distributed computing. A lot of the ultra-modern pipelining in processors can be traced directly to Cray and Amdahl and other designers from the golden age, and if they could have had as much spare hardware and memory as a modern system-on-chip without blowing up both a bank and the power grid, who knows how much further we'd already be.
Re:You know the old saying... (Score:4, Funny)
Heydey IBM didn't suck. You whippersnappers just don't appreciate what we had to do on mainframes to lay the groundwork for distributed computing.
And in those day, laying groundwork was uphill. Both ways.
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On the minus side, a poor engineer will not even be able to do Rust at this time, so Rust benefits form that you likely get better people as you either have to get one of the very few people that can do Rust or get one that can learn it fast.
That said, do not mix languages on a large project unless you have to. And of you really go Rust, make sure you have more than one engineer who can work with it. Also counting against Rust is that it is too new.
I would also say that the person insisting on Rust is actin
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An excellent engineer can write excellent C, but a poor engineer can overflow buffers and leave dangling pointers hanging around... but not in Rust.
A poor developer will write C code that doesn't work at all. A mediocre developer will write C code that works, but is rife with security vulnerabilities. An excellent developer will write C code that needs an excellent attacker to exploit. Unfortunately, the world has quite a lot of excellent attackers in it.
Cant we just talk directly instead? (Score:5, Funny)
Im just 2 cubicles away from you, sad i read about it here
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Is it practical to keep developing in C? (Score:5, Informative)
You should definitely investigate rust. It's very well designed. It has great support to call into C code and C libraries. It compiles fast. The standard library is much more convenient than C/C++. You have complete memory safety by default, without garbage collection. It has great support for safe multithreading. Over time, your speed will increase because you won't be spending weeks tracking a heisenbug due to memory corruption. There is some learning overhead, but it's worth it.
The biggest issue is that you won't have as big of an ecosystem around rust. You won't find good support for all of the libraries that you might want to use. But those problems aren't insurmountable.
Re: Is it practical to keep developing in C? (Score:2)
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pointers & C (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:pointers & C (Score:4, Informative)
Sigh.
Rust does have pointers and it is close to the hardware. It has a very similar machine model to C and of course C++. It also has an advanced, modern type system that disappears during compilation which makes large classes of error which are easy in C flat out impossible.
It's not obfuscation. You're telling the compiler what your intent is and the compiler checks that you're doing what you say.
To the OP: it might not be a bad idea. Though if you're considering C and Rust, you really ought to have C++ on the table. It's got the same resource footprint as the other two. You can be much less foot-shooty in C++ than C if you use modern style (no loss of efficiency either), and the tooling is much more mature than Rust.
There's really no reason ever to use C over C++ if you have a C++ compiler available.
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To the OP: it might not be a bad idea. Though if you're considering C and Rust, you really ought to have C++ on the table. It's got the same resource footprint as the other two. You can be much less foot-shooty in C++ than C if you use modern style (no loss of efficiency either), and the tooling is much more mature than Rust.
There's really no reason ever to use C over C++ if you have a C++ compiler available.
So many bad books on C++ make this very hard for people to learn. I haven't yet found a good site for explaining why and how to have empty destructors for all but a few carefully-reviewed library classes (this is more than just RAII, or perhaps it's the golden version of it). Heck, it'd be nice to find a good guide to the latest standard, with a bunch of new anti-foot-shooting tools, plus "concepts" to allow much more sane templating for performance.
Heck, even explaining how to use std::strings and vector
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Your classes don't need empty constructors, especially if they have nothing to destroy.
However in most cases a 'base class' should have a virtual destructor!
If that one is empty depends on the class.
Re:pointers & C (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason for empty destructors is that destructors that actually clean up resources are usually a bad idea. (Debugging-related stuff in destructors is different.) The "allocate in the constructor, clean up in the destructor" pattern was a natural evolution from well-written C code. If you were used to "allocate at the top of the function, clean up at the bottom", it was the obvious better approach. But it's still just as error-prone (just fewer places for errors), and the fact that the destructor doesn't get called if the constructor throws isn't broadly internalized by coders (and is my least-favorite intermittent resource leak to run down).
Having very small resource-specific classes, similar in functionality to auto_ptr or unique_ptr (just managing a file handle or whatever instead of memory allocation) is the better answer. Only clean up a resource in a class whose only purpose is to clean up a resource. Using those primitives as members in other classes, or as local variables, is as idiot-proof as C++ gets.
The resource-leak headaches saved by difference in approach is amazing when junior coders are involved, it's really a difference in kind. And it's dead easy to police in code-reviews. The last time I did C++ we had a single, templated class in library code, and nowhere else in the code base was a non-trivial destructor allowed. (Odd cases like adding an object to a global list, and removing it on destruction could be managed within this system.)
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The last time I did C++ we had a single, templated class in library code, and nowhere else in the code base was a non-trivial destructor allowed.
Are you sure? If you aggregate (say) an int with a string in a simple struct, the struct will have an automatically generated non trivial destructor, since it needs it to clean up the string. But you don't, of course, have to write a single line of code to make it work properly.
Re:pointers & C (Score:4, Informative)
Since C++11 the destructor invocation in case of an exception is guaranteed. http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_f... [stroustrup.com]
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I'd settle for something good on how to use unicode with C OR C++. Saying "use ICU" doesn't help when there's no decent documentation on using ICU. After looking over the C++11 standard carefully, it looks as if it *is* possible to use unicode with C++, but it's still not clear how. Were I already an experienced C++ programmer, perhaps the discussion of facets would make sense. As it is...no. And there don't even seem to be any decent examples.
Most of the libraries for using unicode aren't sufficient f
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I wish I could have C++, but stuck with C. I don't want the ugly parts of C++, but the simple stuff like slightly better typing, simple non-virtual classes, etc. Most of the people who objected to it are gone now though, so...
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Seems you just want to get rid of the C++ library, which is pretty easy; simply don't use it.
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I just want the better-C-than-C. The problem is people are worried that once you make a switch to C++ that you're on the slippery slope to bloatware. Which is why C++ is much less common in the embedded systems world.
Re:pointers & C (Score:4, Informative)
The only benefit C++ arguably has over C in terms of avoiding common pitfalls is the STL and automatic destructors.
That's like saying the only thing we have better than the 1500s is electricity and internal combustion engines.
And if you follow a strict RAII pattern in C code, the lack of automatic destructors is much less of a burden.
But why bother? Do it in C++ and you get the same resource usage but with 1/10 of the typing and 1/10 of the bugs.
Every line of code you write is a potential bug. In C++ you can program the compiler to write them automatically for you bug free every single time.
Actually, the #1 reason not to use C++ is because if using C seems too tedious, then you should really consider using a higher level language altogether.
The lack of resource management makes C very tedious. C++ does it better than many other languages.
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The only benefit C++ arguably has over C in terms of avoiding common pitfalls is the STL and automatic destructors.
I probably do more C and than C++ when writing C++ code. I typically use C++ classes (abstract, etc), namespaces, and (now) STL. This just helps with segregating the code into their logical parts so structure X doesn't get used on functions only meant to manage structure Y or data type Z.
new/delete? Well, I'll use them for classes only. Structures get allocated with malloc/free. Yes, a class is only use for data+functions and structures are only used for pure data; allocation patterns follow this same m
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Unless you might want to switch architectures in 2 years, and you don't want to only choose from architectures with good C++ compilers.,
At this point, it's segmented PICs (? maybe) and obscure DSPs without C++ compilers. Just about everything else is supported by GCC a or IAR, both of which compile C++, though IAR is about 5 years out of date in that regard.
In any case if you're that deep embedded, porting is basically a rewrite anyway.
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C++ adds gives the writer the ability to use virtual methods very easily, you're kind of tying one hand behind your back if you don't use polymorphism
That's one of the easier things in C: just put a function pointer in the class, one function pointer for each method. Of course then you need a whole vTable per class, where as C++ has a single pointer to the vTable and then one copy of the vtable. The idiomatic C way is much more bloated.
so then you start getting bloat with your virtual tables, which can beco
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What about for something like an OS?
The only coherent argument I've seen for writing an os C rather than C++ is the annoyance of setting up the C++ runtime (it can be done though). The only other arguments I've seen basically assume that the world of computing has not advanced since about 1995. What were valid points then are simply wrong now.
Or for tiny little embedded stuff where memory is an issue? (Honestly curious, I'm not current with the latest C++ developments.)
C++ doesn't use more memory than C. In
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Obviously C has abstraction to some degree from the hardware, or you'd just use assembly. So you're basically arguing "C has what C has, so why wouldn't you use C?"
The answer is because there are problems with C, including pointers. If you pass a pointer to a child thread in C, what happens when you write through that pointer in the main thread? You're not required to use locks, and you're not required to remember that you don't own the pointer any more, so it's very easy to make a mistake and use a poin
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The whole point of assembly is to be close to the hardware. The hardware has registers. Why obfuscate?
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You should do it like the hardware does. Use numeric memory addresses as targets of instructions that address memory.
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Hardware has registers / stacks and jumps. Pointers are just too high level...
It's not already rusted? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It's not already rusted? (Score:5, Funny)
One might say 'crusty'.
No. (Score:2, Informative)
No.
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Unfortunately, it's still in the "growing" stage of languages, and may never make it out of Mozilla world, and Mozilla themselves might even drop support, which means you're in trouble.
When you're choosing a language, you have to look at the entire ecosystem surrounding the language. It's not enough to look only at the language itself.
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If you have to sell some relatively obscure language to a big team, or to a corporation or whatever, then yes I agree with you - go with the tried and true (even if it's also painful and tedious) unless you have a hell of a specific killer feature as a reason for using the new tool instead of the old one.
But for smaller side projects, personal projects, experimenting - why not
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No one expects an obscure new language to gain mind-share without a good reason.
There is one crucial element to a new language gaining support: expressive power. Does it let you to express the solution to a problem in a better way than others?
Actually, there are two elements: expressive power and viable cross-platform support. Compilers and/or interpreters must perform well and be available for all platforms that matter.
Well, really there are three elements ... uh ...
I'll come in again.
kids these days... (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't like C because they haven't been taught it properly and instead go for things that are just trying to re-invent the wheel. Tell this guy to STFU, read a copy of the K&R book, and then get back to work using the native language of *nix.
Re:kids these days... (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't like C because they haven't been taught it properly and instead go for things that are just trying to re-invent the wheel.
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Rust is probably harder to get to grips with then C. The difference is that when you screw up in rust, it usually yells at you. When you screw up in C, it blithely goes on doing what it thinks you want.
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You're probably someone who considers themselves and 'old school hacker' and have been out of a programming job for twenty years
Or he's doing a different job than you. I've got a pile of C code I'm staring at now, which is going in to active products that ship in the tens of millions. I have both never been unemployed longer than I wanted to be, nor had any issues selling my "dinosaur" C skills. I've never worked anywhere that C skills aren't a job requirement, nor that replacing C would get you anything
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More power to you, but AC's tone was quite different.
Community Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Community Support (Score:5, Informative)
The SpineJS repository has 4 contributors. The Rust/Lang repository has 1,188 contributors. (on github)
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If languages have poor adoption and support you have to reinvent every wheel.
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It's not the language itself... (Score:5, Insightful)
... that determines its success or not in a non-nieche segment.
It's the mass of developers that already know it, it's the accumulated code base (both locally and globally) and most importantly: the eco system of tools surrounding it: the compilers, the IDEs, the debuggers, the static/dynamic code analysis, build systems, code generators, mock tools, coverage tools etc.
The new kids on the block have a lot of catching up to do in areas which are not directly language related.
New (Score:2)
According to wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Rust 1.0, the first stable release, was released on May 15, 2015."
So it's five months old.
Portability (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yeah, for now this is one of the bigger drawbacks. The officially supported platforms [rust-lang.org] are:
There is supposed to be ARM support in the works.
Re:Portability (Score:5, Informative)
What you say was true of early releases of Rust. But they removed all traces of any kind of runtime for exactly this reason. It was a breaking change but it happened quite a long time before the 1.0 release. Here's the documentation for the change: https://github.com/rust-lang/r... [github.com]
Here's a blog entry on using Rust for embedded. It dates from February and uses 1.0-alpha but of course 1.0 is out now:
http://spin.atomicobject.com/2... [atomicobject.com]
In these days of LLVM, the portability story is good, even relative to C. No C portability gotchas.
Consider more than just the implementation (Score:5, Insightful)
How many other engineers are going to be expected to know and maintain this? Ones you have on staff? Are you making sure to hire for folks who know Rust? If you have one, is your ops team up to supporting applications written in Rust, familiar with the errors and can handle it? What's the life expectancy of the app? Ever going to need to port it in the future?
Don't forget to factor in the bus factor, when you lose a whole engineer.
Lots of folks end up missing these and you end up with mysterious legacy code the business completely depends on for day to day ops that no one knows or understands. Heck, the other day, I was asked to unlock a windows NT laptop because it was the only known repository of source code for an app that was written over a decade ago - hopefully.
Re:Consider more than just the implementation (Score:4, Insightful)
Any decently educated programmer can pick up any language quickly and easily.
Hire polyglots not language end-users.
I'm torn on this one. On one hand, yes, anyone with a CS background who didn't cheat through school can learn a new language quickly.
The issue is whether they can learn to write idiomatically correct code in that language, and whether they "think" in terms of how that language was designed. That usually requires a bit of time, not to mention some patience. Python is my usual example for this, it breaks a lot of (in my opinion) sensible conventions that people over 10 are used to: no need for semicolons (sneered at if you use them), mandatory white space, duck-typing, etc. Yes, you can learn python in a few hours, but to write "good" python that other python people can/want to support, and generally don't waste time fighting the language, you need to spend some time.
Generally when I see a language like this I want to barf, but it's hard not to run in to something like this a few times in life, and if you're on the hiring side and you have a pile of (say) Python, you probably want to hire someone that can do it properly, versus someone from say, C, who is going to be very upset with almost everything.
wouldn't hold my breath (Score:2)
The problem with languages like Rust is that, in addition to addressing important issues in the languages they intend to replace, their designers also go off on an ego-trip, introducing numerous gratuitous syntactic changes, overlooking important features in their predecessor language they didn't understand, and adding features few people actually need. It's possible that a language like Rust will eventually replace C, but I wouldn't put my money on any particular one.
More likely, ideas from Rust will simpl
Re:wouldn't hold my breath (Score:5, Informative)
1st paragraph is false, due to the rather extraordinary design process that Rust went through.
designers also go off on an ego-trip, introducing numerous gratuitous syntactic changes, overlooking important features in their predecessor language they didn't understand
The Rust community is quite large, including many skilled language designers. The Rust github repository has ~1200 contributers. With that pool of talent,
there are no features of C/C++ that the designers don't understand. With this kind of community, and a formal change review/feature addition process, there's not much danger of a single ego-tripping designer messing up the language.
adding features few people actually need
The project transitioned from a hobby project to an official Mozilla project in 2009. During the 6 years from 2009 to 2015 (when the Rust 1.0 design was stabilized and released), a lot of Rust code was written. Features that seemed like a good idea at the time, but which had little practical use, were removed before 1.0.
3rd paragraph is also incorrect. The main feature of Rust is guaranteed memory safety, without a garbage collector, enforced by compile time type checking rather than by introducing run-time overhead. This memory safety includes a guarantee that shared global data can't be corrupted by simultaneous writes from different threads, something that no other language offers. C++ doesn't offer this today, no other language does.
I agree that Rust will influence future languages, but I don't think it will have much effect on C. The C++ community is already looking at Rust and trying to figure out how to compete with what it offers.
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The C++ community is already looking at Rust and trying to figure out how to compete with what it offers.
Like what?
Here [msdn.com] is Stroustrup talking for over and hour and a half just three weeks ago about how to both narrow and enhance C++ to achieve, among other things, a degree of memory safety, pervasive ownership semantics (std::owner<>) and enabling the compiler do a better job of detecting faulty code. The parallels with Rust are impossible to miss.
It has been a long time since anything challenged the C/C++ paradigm. In that time a large number of non-"systems" languages have emerged, leaving the low-level stu
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This. C can be fixed. It takes time, and compilers are usually ahead of the standard. How long did it take for C to get the restrict keyword? That allows us to control pointer aliasing in a portable way. The impetus for that was that FORTRAN could outperform C because, AFAIK, it assumes no aliasing.
There are already a lot of static checkers [llvm.org] for C. I'm willing to wager they can catch just as many bugs at compile-time as Rust. Having such tools is almost as good as having checks integrated into a stand
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Even if templates are already present in C++, they are a PITA to use. Rust is really really easy to use for those.
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Rust doesn't allow null values or null pointers. The Rust compiler automatically frees memory when the last reference to it goes out of scope. Variables are immutable by default. You can't use pointer arithmetic by default. Only one mutable reference to any piece of memory is permitted to exist at any one time by the
Use C (Score:4, Insightful)
Show him this story to indicate your attention to him and use C instead of this new-fangled and still-evolving language anyway.
You'll get better debugging tools, more productivity (since you know C better) and a wider pool of replacement developers should the need arise.
C like languages (Score:2)
What if I need another engineer to work on the code? ...mI would guess such an engeneer is in the wrong profession, no? Implying he can not cope with Rust, as I understood you.
If we are talking about 'C-like' languages, Rust, D, Java, C#
Is Rust written in Rust? (Score:2)
If Rust, the compiler and everything is written in Rust, then I would trust it.
It looks like it's written in big parts in C and C++.
Don't know if it's glue to the rest of the system or that Rust wasn't good enough.
Maybe someone can elaborate?
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I'm not aware of a 'compiler compiler' aka parser and scanner generator, that generates Rust code. ...
So bootstrapping the language with itself requires a parser generator that emits Rust
Talk to hardware? (Score:2)
A lot depends on where and how you want to talk to the hardware. Last time I checked, the kernel (or kernel driver) is the only thing directly writing to memory space mapped to actual hardware and the kernel is the only space where you are catching CPU interrupts. Depending on your platform, the kernel is very likely going to be written in C.
If you are making calls to the kernel drivers from userspace via kernel file interface, ioctls, or some other user-to-kernel API, then you can do that in just about a
It depends... (Score:2)
Now I'm heading a project that uses a RoR application...
To quote an old Irishman I knew once, "Oh boy, now yez' inna helluva fix!" :)
But seriously, as for what language to use, that would be one that you know and are familiar with that can do what you need it to do.
In other words, I have no idea because there wasn't really enough specific info in your post for me to take a good guess. Sometimes it's best to work backwards and figure out what tools or languages won't work or aren't suited to the task. That can often help narrow down the list of possible choices,
He could (Score:2)
said he could write the extensions needed easily in Rust.
This is probably true but its also aggressively stupid. Ruby, Matz Ruby anyway, is a C program, Rubinius is a C++ program, JRuby is Java. The point of writing Ruby extensions obviously is so that you can leverage the expressive power of the high level interpreted language to get stuff done fast and safely while interfacing whatever it is you need to interface.
Your extensions should not be complex. They really should allocate a little memory to store what needs to be stored, and do some type conversions f
Rust is cool (Score:4, Insightful)
But it's still immature. I wouldn't personally use it for anything important.
Maybe? (Score:2)
Not if you need to suspend code (Score:2)
If your code has to suspend itself for a specified period of time, then I would not recommend using Rust. Remember...
Rust never sleeps.
Re: (Score:2)
I should've seen that coming, but it was out of the blue.
Another Option (Score:2)
Concentrate on the Employee (Score:5, Insightful)
The engineer pushing for rust is emphatic, should I bulldoze him or take the plunge?
Take yourself out of the loop. Give it to the engineer. He/she wants to push it. Let him/her. Make the engineer responsible for pushing it, training people, documenting the procedures. Provide room to enable it to happen.
This is how the engineer grows and an engineer and how you grow as a manager, learning to trust the technical opinion of those doing to technical work.
Good software engineers can learn new languages. (Score:2)
A good software engineer should be able to learn a new language in a week or so. If there is something inherent in the language which makes this not possible, e.g. pointers, generics, functional v. procedural, etc., then the software engineer has a gaping hole in his/her knowledge and may need some additional training.
That point aside, I think the discussion here makes the decision C, mostly because of unknown future support for Rust--it is too new to know.
Unless C has an easily describable deficiency whic
What is that project for? (Score:2)
If it is just for fun, go ahead and play with Rust. You can write C-compatible libraries with it no problem.
If it is for work, however ... Stay with your C.
Rust is nice and everything, but the ecosystem is incredibly small. There are few libraries for it, many are already unmaintained and/or not working. Also the tooling (IDEs, compiler, the cargo build tool, etc.) are fairly immature. I have been looking at it recently with the goal of writing some extension modules for Node.js & .NET, but I went back
I don't know about replacing C (Score:2)
I don't know about replacing C but my car certainly seems to think that replacing Fe with rust is a practical thing to do!
No. (Score:2)
C has probably been around longer than you have. Rust probably isn't even a blip on the radar.
Be very wary of embracing immature technology for anything that matters. There are good reasons to do it, but they have to be EXTREMELY good reasons.
Otherwise, even if the tech succeeds, you will be stuck with a code base with immature and deprecated idioms. (Note the very old Java applets you sometimes see on the web that modern versions of Java make nearly impossible to run. So much for "write once run anywher
Re: (Score:2)
I am struggling to understand how the 'listen backlog size for a TCP socket' could be a feature of a 'C like' language.
Are TCP sockets a fundamental variable type in Rust?
Re: (Score:2)
No. But std::net in the standard library implements socket support. Presumably it is assumed that the user who needs a socket is going to use this, although of course calls to a C socket libraries could be made if std::net is not sufficiently flexible.
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds more like a library issue to me. It is a hallmark of a badly designed library though. Making common things easy is good, making common things easy while making uncommon things impossible is bad.
The default TCP settings may be perfect for 99% of the time. For the remaining 1%, this library is useless.
If you think this may be fine, let me ask you this; have you ever created a program which didn't have atleast one uncommon "1%" thing in it?
A programmer who believes there is no possible way some particul
Re: (Score:3)
1) The Rust project is not controlled by Mozilla. Just look at the copyrights on the rust source code. It's permissive open source, with copyright shared by ~1200 individuals, and Mozilla is not on that list. So this is like spreading FUD by warning people that Linux is controlled by the Linux Foundation (Linus's employer)--hint, it isn't.
2) Mozilla and Oracle are quite different. The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, open source organization that exists to provide a public benefit through the creation of
Re: (Score:2)
You can't.
I believe that point 3 is what humans call humor.
Re: (Score:3)
Isn't humor supposed to be funny?
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If your embedded system can't be allowed to crash, you shouldn't be calling malloc(). At least, not once you've booted up and started running the main code.
The embedded software I work with typically has fixed-size arrays allocated at startup, and explicitly handles cases where it doesn't have enough space in the array.
Re: (Score:2)
That's more dogmatic than I would accept. I worked on a highly successful system that was full of malloc and free calls, which had to work autonomously for greater than one month submerged in the ocean with only brief surfacings with very low bandwidth RF connection. We had a lot of discipline and applied a lot of care and testing. There were times that in-service instances did crash, reboot, and continue operating, but the
Re: (Score:2)