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by forbidden404 3716 days ago
I've been looking Rust with good eyes and I want to be using it in my future projects in College. But how easy would it be for developers to "give up" OOP for a more safe and up-front language like Rust?

I mean this as a serious question, cause I see C++ being used instead of C thanks to its multi-paradigm capability and I don't know how Rust could fight that for now.
2 comments
vvanders 3716 days ago
You're not really giving up OOP with Rust, traits give you interface abstraction which is most of what you're getting with C++. As I write more C++ I find myself using less classes and more structs + functions that let me decouple my code and data.

If anything I would say Rust is a tad more multi-paradigm due to its really strong functional roots(Sum types!) and nicer treatment of lambdas(no alloc like in std::function).

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lmitchell 3716 days ago
Maybe a bit off-topic, but I just want to clarify - lambdas only include dynamic allocation if you convert them to an std::function, right? I was under the impression that 'auto f = []{...}' did no heap allocation, but converting to an std::function could, depending on the size of the closure.
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vvanders 3716 days ago
Yup your on the mark, it leads to some interesting scenarios where you can't easily refactor code without either introducing template hell or taking the hit for std::function.
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TillE 3716 days ago
Rust is currently lacking plenty of "quality of life" features which even C++ has (eg, default parameters). Not to mention a good IDE. I do think it's the first serious contender to eventually replace C++, but it's really not there yet.

It's definitely worth trying and learning. I would've ditched C++98 in a heartbeat to move to Rust, but C++ is a pretty exciting and productive place to be ever since C++11.

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Retra 3716 days ago
I haven't needed an IDE in Rust. The auto-generated documentation is usually good enough for all my needs. However, C++ is pretty awful without an IDE, because you can easily end up with deep object hierarchies, usually with two files per object.

It's also nice to just tab to your terminal and do `cargo run` and get your code compiled out of the box. Writing a decent makefile (or whatever else you plan to do) for C++ is comparatively quite a hassle.

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bluejekyll 3716 days ago
From a code writing perspective, Rust's support in Atom and other editors thought Racer is pretty good. Debugging is my big issue right now. For that I drop into lldb in UI mode, which works fine, but I would love to see that integrated into one of the ide's out there.

Anyway, the lack of an IDE hasn't hampered my ability to be productive in Rust. Unlike Java, C++, et al.

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