[safety-third]

I actually have had the pleasure of porting a program from a defunct 16-bit language called Actor to C++. It wasn't a huge deal even at around 800 kLOC. All mainstream languages in the future are going to have some combination of structured, functional, and object-oriented programming. Converting is mostly going to be about syntax and libraries.

As someone who has worked with C and C++ for living for over 20 years, I wouldn't think twice about picking either Go or Rust if I were to start again. Go gives you the fast edit/compile/test loop of an interpreted language with the runtime speed of a compiled language. Rust is the language that the C++ Committee would make if they could start over.

That being said, Go will never take over the C, C++, and Rust niche. Going to and from Go-land and C-land is too expensive. Google has no interest in stepping behind libraries that aren't internet servers. Go will live a long life as a great environment to port your Python, Ruby, and other bloated server languages. It just will never be the next language to write a web browser.

Rust is amazing though. I see this as the programming language of the future until the U.S. Government slams down the hammer and forces everyone to use DOD-approved Ada.

[carlmr]

>Rust is amazing though. I see this as the programming language of the future until the U.S. Government slams down the hammer and forces everyone to use DOD-approved Ada.

I'd be happy if we used ADA or Rust for embedded systems. They're both amazing in their own right.

[pjmlp]

I don't share the same negativity towards Go, in spite of disliking some of its design decisions.

TinyGO, TamaGO, Android's GAPID, Fuchsia's TCP/IP stack, gVisor, are all good examples that Go has a place on C's domain, when one is willing to invest the resources (time and money) into making it happen.

Using Ada wouldn't be that bad actually. :)

As for Rust, now with Google using it on Fuchsia and Microsoft doing internal Rust summits, lets see how it evolves. Both companies are quite big into ISO C++.

[littlestymaar]

> Fuchsia's TCP/IP stack

Isn't it the part they decided to rewrite in Rust two years ago ? Or am I confusing with something else ?

[pjmlp]

Netstack appears to still being used, looking at the code repository.

And even if not, gVisor keeps using it, and gVisor is used in production on Crostini and Google Cloud.

[downerending]

Rust is interesting and clever, but it will not see widespread use, for pretty much the same reason that Haskell won't: It's simply too complex for Joe Coder to deal with.

C++ is likewise quite complex, but it has the huge advantage that a team of mediocre programmers can largely just keep to a simple subset of the language and bumble along. With Rust, you must learn and deal with the memory model, and it's not an easy thing.

[heavenlyblue]

There’s nothing complex about Rust memory model

[wolf550e]

I think the conclusion is that C++ is too dangerous in the hands of non-experts.

[downerending]

As far as it goes, I agree, and I rarely recommend C++ as the right language for a project.

Nonetheless, on real-world projects, a team of average programmers can make reasonable headway in C++. They'll probably write a lot of dubious and buggy code and eventually slam into the complexity wall. In Rust, they'd slam into a wall almost immediately and very noticeably. Managers won't put up with that.

[pasabagi]

I've never really dug into C++, but I've written a little bit of C, and I feel it's generally easier to write a given program in Rust than it is in C.

I can see why Rust has its reputation for difficulty - the burrow checker is a new idea, and the unfamiliar is inherently dificult. However, I think once you've spend a modicum of time, it's a fairly straightforward language, simply because the compiler almost always tells you exactly what you're doing wrong.

I don't feel like it's a particularly ergonomic language, and it's certainly hard to read (very symbol dense), but I think it's easier to learn to appease the burrow checker than it is to debug your average C program, especially if you're the sort of person (I certainly am) that produces dubious and buggy code more days than not.

[downerending]

That may be, but debugging "looks like work" in the eyes of mgmt.

The borrow checker, on the other hand, looks more like "I can't find any applicants in Little Rock who can do this stuff.".

[pasabagi]

On the other hand, I think the most important thing in making developers replaceable is the degree to which the codebase explicitly contains all the information relevant to it.

Lifetimes are an additional, important piece of information that would have previously been something a programmer would have to have an intuition for, or that would need to be put in documentation.

Now, that work is delegated to the compiler, and so, your individual developer is somewhat more fungible.

I don't know if rust is specifically the future in this regard, but I think if I was a machivellian manager, I'd be interested in replacing instances of human intuition and group knowledge with tooling, as much as possible. The burrow checker is one such tool - even if automatic garbage collection is probably a more straightforward one.

[celticmusic]

> Rust is the language that the C++ Committee would make if they could start over.

Bjarne has explicitly refuted this opinion.

[ptx]

Did he go into more detail?