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by jonny383
2400 days ago
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>There are codebases out there measured in the hundreds of MLOC. I agree with your argument, but I think in practice trying to "port" something with hundreds of MLOC is a losing battle (especially away from C). By the time you finished porting to rust (or your other language of the week), rust will likely have come and gone and will be been replaced by something either better or "better". IMO people should spend less time trying to re-invent the wheel in rust and more time either improving C or the tooling / static analysis for C. It would avoid _so many_ of these issues. |
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And I'm all for more C tooling. Static analysis, fuzzing, sanitizers, valgrind, clang thread safety annotations, etc. are all wonderful tools I lean on heavily. But these are opt in, patchwork, platform specific, rife with false positives, false negatives, inconsistent, slow, painful to configure and use... I've wanted far more out of my C and C++ tooling than it's been able to give me for many years now. I'll frequently try out new attributes and annotations, only to curse when they fail to handle really trivial edge cases.
Meanwhile, Rust? It already catches things I didn't even realize I wanted to catch. Static checks opt-out into fast dynamic checks opt-out into heisenbugs in auditable unsafe blocks. The defaults are great.
I doubt C or C++'s tooling will reach the state of Rust, as frozen today, within the next decade. Smart people have tried long and hard to improve things, with quite middling results, convincing me it's a hard problem. I'm a bit more optimistic that it might catch up within the next century, but if I'm not long dead by then, I'll almost certainly be long retired. If it eventually does catch up, I suspect it'll have taken more than a few notes from Rust's approach.
I share your wariness of re-inventing the wheel, but the C & C++ static analysis ecosystem has left enough to be desired that I think it's warranted in this case. It's to rust's credit that they aren't re-inventing everything, and e.g. leverage LLVM for codegen, optimizations, debug info generation, etc.