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by yakubin 2537 days ago
One thing about static analysis tools that seems to be easily forgotten about in discussions about rust vs other languages is that those tools are trivially ignorable. If your CI pipeline doesn't let you get a binary for a given milestone, because the code doesn't pass static analysis, unit/integration tests etc. people will just disable it for myriads of reasons not the least of which will be "management wanted it to be done by yesterday and it compiles, so it's probably ok", "it's probably false positives again [yeah, right...]", "this is the test that fails from time to time, it's probably nothing". A compilation error is a much better protection from the social pitfalls of programming in a corporate environment. So yup, you have all those wonderful tools at your disposal in the C/C++ which I guarantee you will ignore or be forced to ignore at your peril.
2 comments
blub 2537 days ago
Using the same logic, you could argue that people will just use unsafe and shared pointers everywhere if they have a deadline and they can't get their code to compile.

This is an organizational problem, not a language / tool problem.

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zbentley 2537 days ago
Even when abusing unsafe, it's hard to get away with as much laziness (especially sneaky, dangerous, indirected laziness) as you can get away with by default/accidentally in other languages when you disable their linting/analysis tools.
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pjmlp 2537 days ago
Actually I tend to refer to it quite often.

However one needs to see the full picture, not only language grammar and semantics.

If I want to create a GUI application today, I will definitely use a mix of .NET ,Java, with C++ for the low level performance bits, because Rust is lacking in that area, in spite of being a safer language.

So, if C++ takes a lesson or two from Rust, and helps developers like myself to keep productive, while improved the security of the whole stack, then so much the better.

And if Rust continues to improve, maybe one day Android Studio, XCode, VS, will provide an end-to-end mixed language experience, and OS frameworks, for Rust just like they do for C++ nowadays.

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