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by swiftcoder 2612 days ago
It's a bona fide C++ killer for applications that are both security and performance critical. It's already gaining traction for those applications even within relatively conservative engineering organisations.

That said, there are many performance-critical applications who are not security-critical, and in those I'd expect C/C++ to persist pretty much indefinitely. And many security-critical applications which are not performance-critical, and can perfectly well be served by garbage collected languages like Java/C#/Go.

2 comments

Cargo is the problem for those organizations. People who worry about security and safety often develop on airgapped networks. You can go nostd for small stuff. For bigger stuff you could mirror crates.io but that isn't a well supported workflow and it's a lot o code from a lot of randos. The notion of a blessed subset would help get more buy in from that community. Even still, rustup isn't working on airgapped Dev nets and it's a nice feature especially if you are crosscompiling.
Cargo now supports airgapped use (no crates.io, no github) since the latest release.
Awesome! Can you provide some documentation to get me started? I have been unable to find any.
Thankfully Cargo is an optional component. We've replaced Cargo for internal use (all dependencies checked into the monorepo and compiled with Buck).
It is a legitimate C killer. C++, not so much.
people who liked C (and didn't like C++) are more likely to move to go. Rust has a healthy community of ex and current C++ programmers.
People who don't like GC will not move to Go.
I don't like GC (on an ideological level), but I still write most stuff in Go because I'm so insanely productive in it. Will probably use more Rust once async/await is there and mature enough.