Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by giancarlostoro 120 days ago
Don't hate me for this, but... is 20 years of Rust really new?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)

I do get what you mean, but Rust has been baking for a decade, finally took off after 10 years of baking, and now that is been repeatedly tried and tested it is eating the world, as some developers suggested it could eventually do so. I however do think this shows a different problem:

If nobody writes unit tests, how do you write them when you port over projects to ensure your new language doesn't introduce regressions. All rewrites should be preceded by strong useful unit tests.

2 comments

Ideally, but if a project wasn't written with tests at the time then finding a working time machine can be a challenge. If you try to add them later you won't capture all the nuance that went into the original program. After all, if the implementation code was expressive enough to capture that nuance, you'd already have your test suite, so to speak. Tests are written to fill in the details that the rest of the code isn't able to express.
Tests are written for various goals: integration testing, to prevent regressions, and in the same effort to prevent regressions to protect mission critical / business logic code. If all those nuances are captured by good tests, you arguably have "100%" test coverage, you don't need to test every single line of code ever written to have 100% test coverage in my eyes. But then when you go to translate your project to a new language, you port the tests first, then test against those tests.

This is my personal belief on this anyway.

he has no answer for this
But the 90s was only 20-years ago!

lol, you got me. Stupid old brain not calculating time correctly.

I was born in 1990 so I get it! I still say 21 when people ask me how old I am... Aka how old do I need to say I am to be able to drink alcohol LOL I don't drink that often mind you. I just don't really think about my age a whole lot...