[epistasis]

If one is ready to switch languages, then the clear winner is rust over C++, and I say that as someone who avoided diving into Rust for years because it seemed completely overhyped and with too much cryptic syntax.

C still wins by far when writing libraries that will be used by lots of other people. Doesn't matter what language they are using, they will be able to add in a library written in C very easily. However, C++ or Rust libraries, even with appropriate bindings for the target language, users of the library will need to bring in an entirely new compiler tool chain that may or may not exist on the target architecture. But the C tool chain will exist for that architecture and be robust.

[humanrebar]

Availability of C++ tooling is much, much closer to availability of C tooling (often it's the same tool!) compared to Rust. Adopting Rust isn't the same category of conversion at all.

For new side projects, pick what you want to use of course. But for existing codebases and projects that aspire to have maximum impact, I recommend fully considering tradeoffs instead of thinking in terms of "clear winners".

[insanitybit]

> Availability of C++ tooling is much, much closer to availability of C tooling (often it's the same tool!) compared to Rust. Adopting Rust isn't the same category of conversion at all.

Which tooling? Just curious, asking entirely in good faith. My recollection is that the majority of tooling I was using with C++ worked with Rust - debuggers, profilers, and sanitizers being the main tools. Although I find that I use them much less frequently since I don't find debuggers as useful for the types of bugs I have these days, and sanitizers are only useful if you have unsafe, and profilers are cool but usually I just write benchmarks using a crate and then iterate from there.

[twic]

The parent comment says "compiler tool chain", and i understand "tooling" here as meaning that. So, compiler, linker, assembler, etc.

All the major C compilers are also C++ compilers, and none are (yet) Rust compilers, so out of the gate, C++ has similar availability to C.

[epistasis]

And yet, even with that, Yann Collet credits Google's use of C++ for the compression library as a critical mistake that allowed him, an unknown, to gain traction with his own compression methods. Google later rewrote their library in C:

https://overcast.fm/+LfVPHmBTo

Even if the tool chain exists, it must be adopted, unless you can rely on binaries being available for your end users, which will never be the case for a library which is just starting our. And adding another dependency to your build process, especially one as complex and with as many breaking version changes as C++, is a lot of work to take on.

[pjmlp]

Unless we are talking about an obscure platform or some PIC CPU, a C++ compiler is available on the same box as the C compiler.

Second, extern "C" exists.

Third, in what concerns clang and MSVC, the C library is actually implemented in C++ with extern "C".

[epistasis]

My single sentence may have been too concise, there are two concepts here: 1) the tool chain may or may not exist, and 2) bringing in that tool chain to the build system.

Even if it's the "same" toolchain for compiling C++ as it is C, adding the complexity of an additional language to the build process, and the extra versioning headaches that C++ adds over C, is enough to kill library adoption.

As I said originally, providing bindings is not the challenge, it's all the other stuff.

[bfrog]

If you are going on proprietary tool chains... most of those are moving to llvm which rust is based on. In theory any proprietary toolchain based on llvm could provide rustc given incentives to do so.

If you are speaking to missing a rust compiler built on gcc, that seems to be an ongoing project with some momentum.

Realistically the most widely used architectures are now supported by rustc through llvm... x86, arm, riscv, and even to some extent xtensa now.

Power, arc, mips, sparc, and some others aren't too far away if someone cared enough.

If Linux can support Rust, I'd think that's a good sign most project can use Rust.

[humanrebar]

That's just the compilation toolchain. For better or worse, existing C projects have their whole workflows sitting on top of bespoke tools with the assumption that there is a C toolchain. And Rust projects assume cargo, etc. You're more or less doing a parallel rewrite in Rust to adopt Rust in an existing C project.

The Linux kernel already does extensive bespoke tooling and it's low level enough to skip cargo and such. It's rare to see that approach in Rust projects in the wild.

[insanitybit]

Are we just talking about portability then? Because "same category of conversion" seems fine - I would say that for 99.9999% of projects the difference in portability is non existent.

[pjmlp]

Basically all the libraries, IDEs, game engines, game console SDKs, HFT, HPC, OS SDKs, embedded OSes, High Integrity Computing certifications, and plenty more stuff deployed into production since C++ ARM [0] was published in 1990, 33 years ago.

[0] - The Annotated C++ Reference Manual

[junon]

That's not C++ tooling. That's tooling written in C++. Two very different things.

[pjmlp]

Word games, those are domains dominated by C++, take the meaning the way it makes you happier.

[insanitybit]

You're saying word games but you're arguing something that the poster I replied to wasn't saying.

[junon]

This is nonsense. Rust is based off of LLVM, which is what Clang is based off of. Name one modern, actually used, non-archaic system that LLVM doesn't run on. Beyond that, Cargo and all associated tooling run pretty much everywhere. So I'm not sure what outdated trope you're on about here.

[kllrnohj]

Exporting a stable C ABI/API in no way requires writing the implementation in C. See Android's NDK for a rather widely deployed example. All the APIs are C, yet none of the implementations are C. Same thing works great in Rust, too. You can trivially export C from a Rust implementation.

[epistasis]

My comment acknowledged what you state, but then went on to point out that it requires adding a tool chain to compile Rust or C++, neither of which are trivia and which may not exist at all on the target architecture.

[coliveira]

People using C will not change to your language-du-jour, please stop.

[adwn]

> People using C will not change to your language-du-jour, please stop.

Two years ago, your argument would have implied that Rust would never be allowed into the Linux kernel, and yet here we are.

[BearOso]

Rust in the kernel is a whole different beast than what most people think--no standard library, no cargo or external crates, some memory safety features removed. It's kind of just an alternative syntax.

[coliveira]

There are all kinds of weird stuff in the kernel, many of them will just die.

[mikebenfield]

What other programming languages are used in Linux kernel code?

[netule]

I wonder if Linus it taking the time to teach himself Rust.

[JohnFen]

Almost every dev I know who uses C (including myself) also uses other languages. Nobody should only have one tool in their toolbox.

[epistasis]

You seem to be replying to the wrong comment, I am not suggesting that people switch away from C.

[pjmlp]

They better improve their error free coding skills when liability laws come for them.

[jacquesm]

This I can't wait for but the bigger problem will be that the rest of the development process is at least as broken as the languages are.

[ActorNightly]

Rust is by far not mature enough for serious development. Recent shenanigans with crablang are a strong sign of it going down the route of Java, i.e a corporate developed language with offshoots, which will end up with Rust being in the same crappy state.

[duped]

> Rust is by far not mature enough for serious development

Except it's being used for serious development today

> going down the route of Java, i.e a corporate developed language with offshoots, which will end up with Rust being in the same crappy state.

So one of the most widely used applications programming languages in the world?

[ActorNightly]

>Except it's being used for serious development today

No, its being used for pet projects by people. Serious development = major companies using it in backends.

>So one of the most widely used applications programming languages in the world?

Because of CS programs, and legacy software written in java. Java has a community dedicated to pushing theoretical CS concepts into the language (much like Rust), while allowing things like a logging library to fetch code from anywhere on the internet and execute it, by default (which I would bet on would be the future of Rust given current trajectory)

[c-cube]

> No, its being used for pet projects by people. Serious development = major companies using it in backends.

You mean companies like Dropbox, Cloudflare, Amazon, Microsoft...? Are they too small to be relevant?

[ActorNightly]

Very few things in those companies are being written in Rust, and half of those projects chose Rust around ideological reasons rather than technical, with plenty of 'unsafe' thrown in for performance reasons

https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/search?q=...

The fact that 'unsafe' even exists in Rust means it's no better than C with some macros.

Don't get me wrong, Rust has it's place, like all the other languages that came about for various reasons, but it's not going to gain wide adoption.

Future of programming consists of 2 languages - something like C that has a small instruction set for adopting to new hardware, and something that is very high level, higher than Python with LLM in the background. Everything in the middle is fodder.

[c-cube]

You're moving the goalposts here. Rust is being used, in significant projects (eg: proxies at Cloudflare, a company where http is somewhat of a big deal: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-oxy/ ; Dropbox's new sync algorithm, a company where file syncing id kind of a big deal : https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...).

Equating the existence of unsafe with C is laughable imho (it'd be barely comparable even if 100% of the rust code was in unsafe blocs, which never happens). Not even then it doesn't matter for the original point : rust is used in production for business critical functions, in large companies.