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by ludocode
912 days ago
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A killer feature of C is its simplicity. It is so simple that there are dozens, probably hundreds of independent C compilers and C standard libraries. Rust has no formal specification and no independent implementations even close to complete. gccrs is still struggling to compile the standard library after years of development by some of the smartest compiler writers in the world. Rust is a successor to C++, not C. Rust may be a lot of things but I don't believe it will ever be a successor to C. |
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Well, the Linux kernel which is C and ASM, rejected C++ (for reasons although not technically because of the language itself so much) and it is adopting Rust. Rust is a language & a runtime. You can write C-like code in Rust and C++-like code in Rust or mix'n'match however you like (you can even get close to ML style languages).
> Rust has no formal specification and no independent implementations even close to complete
Rust has plenty of formal specifications. Their whole process is to formally specify how a thing works & then implement it against that spec.
It's not standardized by an external body / doesn't have a snapshot of the standards that are relevant to implement for a given edition. I view standardizing a language as an anti-pattern for similar reasons that attempts to do that with human languages fails - it ossifies things whereas languages really need to continue to grow and evolve (+ standards bodies become their own weird little fiefdoms that often have nothing to do with achieving the goals they're nominally supposed to be focusing on).
Same goes for independent implementations. It's fine for C because C as a language is a very simple thing and hasn't really changed in 30+ years and doesn't really have a runtime (most of the things people call C is actually POSIX).
It has not worked out well for C++ which has stagnated quite badly, having to implement the same feature 3+ times and having representatives from each arguing against features that are more difficult to inject into their architecture and for features that are easier is part of the reason. There are positives in that errata can be found more likely when you implement the same thing 3 times, but it's not clear to me that it's net better than just implementing a thing in the nightly release chain & letting it bake until it's ready.
Having a single frontend simplifies a lot of things. gccrs struggling is a positive thing as far as I'm concerned - it means that the Rust language continues to evolve and isn't concerning itself with needing to support a fork of the frontend.