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by pornel 1696 days ago
Yes, because C versions are frozen in time, and editions aren't. Today Rust added brand new features to Rust 2015 and Rust 2018, and will continue to expand them forever (every new feature lands in all editions whenever possible).

Rust editions are closer to source code parsing modes. More like enabling trigraphs in C or "use strict" in JS.

Additionally, textual header inclusion in C makes mixing versions tricky. Rust has properly isolated crates, and tracks edition per AST node (so that even cross-crate macros work correctly with mixed editions).
1 comments
alerighi 1696 days ago
C compilers usually backport features in older standards as well (I know, they are breaking the standard). One example are C++ style comments, that are in the standard only from C99, but basically every compiler supports them even in ANSI/C90 mode.

By the way the difference is that Rust is not a standard, thus is easier to evolve (the process is much shorter). On the other side, the fact that a language changes slowly it's something good in a way, it means that you don't have to continue to change the way you do things, and update older projects.

That to everyone that has to maintain code for decades it's important. And every serious software project (not hobby stuff) does stay in production decades really. I don't use Rust, or even C++, for that reason.

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nicoburns 1696 days ago
> On the other side, the fact that a language changes slowly it's something good in a way, it means that you don't have to continue to change the way you do things, and update older projects.

Isn’t the point of Rust editions that this is also true for Rust? Don’t want to update to a new edition? Then… don’t. The old ones are maintained.

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lfairy 1686 days ago
> By the way the difference is that Rust is not a standard, thus is easier to evolve (the process is much shorter).

Another thing is ABI.

C and C++ are ABI-stable, which means that many historic mistakes (intmax_t, std::regex, polymorphic allocators) are impossible to fix.

Rust only promises source compatibility, not ABI compatibility, so it has a lot more freedom to tweak its design.

https://thephd.dev/binary-banshees-digital-demons-abi-c-c++-...

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