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by dpc_pw 2613 days ago
Except for stuff like "trusting trust", I find no need for "multiple vendors of Rust toolchains". It only comes handy when the language itself is not truly open source, and is in itself a form of a product.

Building on that " is not standardized," is not a problem, because one Open Source implementation is de facto the standard. Which I find much better than forever fixing your code, working around incompatibilities, bugs, etc. in compilers from different versions.

Which leaves "does not support all of the platforms and use cases that C++ does" which is indeed true.

2 comments

Sometimes different vendors provide some benefits. For example Intel's C++ compiler produces (or used to produce?) much more efficient numerical code than either gcc or clang.

So for numerical applications C++ may make more sense than Rust. Rust does have the advantage of being based on an LLVM backend. So perhaps different vendors can compete by writing more efficient backends that are applicable to both C++ and Rust (but you probably lose some information when skipping the compiler front end)

> For example Intel's C++ compiler produces (or used to produce?) much more efficient numerical code than either gcc or clang.

I'm not an expert, but I believe that Intel could have implemented their hardware-specific optimizations in any other compiler framework (either gcc or clang). In this case multiple language implementations, while commercially viable, are not beneficial to all users.

Use cases and compiler options go hand in hand. Every implementation is a trade-off and different fields demand different trade-offs.