[didibus]

Article did a decent job of showing discipline and care and human involvement to assert the automated rewrite was done diligently, as best as it can be when using AI for it. I does make me feel a bit more comfortable about it.

As an aside, I don't know why anyone would not want to use a memory-safe (and possibly race-safe) language in 2026. Rust gives you that in a performant package, so if you are turned off by GCs and immutability for performance reasons, you still have the option to use Rust.

I can understand when you need the absolute best performance and you decide to drop to down to C++, and I also relate with just personal preference, but beyond those it seems a no brainer to me.

[leecommamichael]

> As an aside, I don't know why anyone would not want to use a memory-safe (and possibly race-safe) language in 2026.

The rust compiler is very slow. The best way to speed it up appears to be organizing a codebase in many crates. This is not preferable ergonomics to many. Beside that, for many problems, a garbage collector eliminates a large amount of defects (including the ones stated in the article) without any added friction, whereas Rust asks that you think in terms of ownership. This is not preferable ergonomics to many.

I realize what I'm saying above, while true, doesn't give a clear example. Many gamedevs would rather iterate with a language that is lower friction, not only because game code is finnicky (like frontend UI code) but because the build process can be unique. Many gamedevs prefer to iterate with hot-reloading, and asking them to use a slower compiler is asking them to accept greater latency in that cycle.

I do not claim that these reasons apply to everyone.

[zamalek]

Game engines are typically in two languages, one for the engine itself and one for scripting. That even goes for Unity: in Unity, C# is a significantly more powerful than average scripting language (for lack of a better term), but the engine itself is still C++.

That's not to say that you couldn't write a commercial game engine with something like C# that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with unity and unreal, but it doesn't seem like anyone has attempted to do so. Maybe it's the decompilation fear.

Also, it would continue to make sense to use a scripting language alongside Rust.

[KronisLV]

> That's not to say that you couldn't write a commercial game engine with something like C# that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with unity and unreal, but it doesn't seem like anyone has attempted to do so.

Stride should mostly fit the bill: https://github.com/stride3d/stride

Their homepage: https://www.stride3d.net/

Even the physics engine they use is in C#: https://github.com/bepu/bepuphysics2

Not a very popular game engine (never got the attention that the likes of Godot did), but it's nice to work with! It’s up there with Stride in regards to the “indie” game engines I like, maybe alongside jMonkeyEngine (since you typically don’t see that many Java game engines either).

[KronisLV]

> It’s up there with Stride

Edit: I mean that it's up there with Flax: https://flaxengine.com/ whoops

Stride, Flax and jMonkeyEngine are all pretty cool, not just Godot and O3DE!

[atrevbot]

As someone who has almost no familiarity with game engines, it seems the success of this port was largely possible due to a comprehensive test suite written in a runtime agnostic way. What might be the equivalent test suite implementation required to successfully port a game engine to another language?

[jamesfinlayson]

Gosh, I don't think any game engines have particularly good test suites at all. GoldSource and Source are the only ones that I have any real experience with and neither seems to have anything (Source may have a handful of things but nothing approaching baseline let alone comprehensive).

I have no idea how game devs handle big refactors other than lots of manual testing.

[sisve]

> Gosh, I don't think any game engines have particularly good test suites at all.

What? I do understand that a CRUD app with little to no logic do not focus on test.

But any kind of engine.. i can not understand that it's not a priority? In general I'm not a big fan of unit test on simple websites, they do not give any real value compared to effort

But I remember working on a complex codename. It was extremely important to have close to 100% unit test in the core part. Saved me a lot.

[ACCount37]

Mostly, because a lot of game engines are ancient relics, tracing their lineage all the way back to Quake 1.

The development practices are not exactly up to date, and game development is in no hurry to change. It doesn't help that software development wages there are not at all competitive - game development selects for passion, not skill. People who want to build robust modern codebases and people who want to build AAA games are different people. So there aren't many game devs who want to push for better test coverage.

But it's also because game engines are dealing with many, many things that are hard to test for.

You know how messy it is to test a website for "does this layout look right" or "can you navigate from A to B"? Now multiply that by complex 3D geometry. A lot of what game engines do is dealing with complex 3D geometry, where the primary verification is "does it look right" and "does this interaction feel right". Which is why game development traditionally has wide human QA, and slim unit testing.

Only now do we have software that can sort of, semi-reliably, automate testing for "does it look right".

[mike_hearn]

A game engine has a vast space of possible outputs, all of which will be considered good enough.

Its primary output is pixels and sound. Those are hard to test in a reasonable way. Screenshot testing is useless in a codebase where most of the changes are about making the pixels prettier.

[hvb2]

> In general I'm not a big fan of unit test on simple websites, they do not give any real value compared to effort

And then your site gets more traction, features are added, things are refactored.

And now you're looking at what used to be a simple site, still with no tests.

It's a habit, that pays off long term. You don't do it for yourself, you do it for who changes the code next. Might be you, or not. Even when you do it yourself, you can't hold all the requirements in you brain, you write those up in tests

[jamesfinlayson]

I agree - maybe some modern game engines have unit tests for stuff like their physics engine and their "standard library" code (optimised data structures, maths utilities, string utilities etc) but as others have said, testing sound and vision is hard, and something that hasn't been mentioned is all the different flags in a game engine - testing even a sensible subset of all the different sound and rendering variables would be a huge undertaking.

[zamalek]

One option would be to have an input replay alongside captured outputs (audio visual), at some fixed framerate. Capturing intermediates (scene graph etc.) would probably also be valuable, as that could help nail down why something is failing.

Or you could do it [as I recall the project being called] the scientist way. You still have the old code, so you could replay inputs against each and compare. Probably more realistic because uncompressed video would be a ridiculously huge dataset. This would be more resilient in the face of testing hardware and driver drift.

Historically game engines are the worst offenders when it comes to unit testing. I'm not sure if that's still the case - but that's why I erred on the side of integration tests.

[hdjrudni]

Box3D just showcased some stuff including deterministic replays. If you wanted to port that, you could probably import the replay and make sure it plays back the same way in your new language. I think it captures the inputs and forces applied, not the pixels.

I suppose rendering is a component of a game engine too though, not just physics. I don't know how to do that reliably. Even if you captured pixels, it'd be annoying. If you've ever tried doing screenshot based diffing on web you will know that slight changes in aliasing in Chrome bugger everything up. Things that should be equivalent randomly aren't but not in a way that any human would care.

[pjmlp]

Several C++ parts of Unity have been slowly migrated to HPC# though.

[bdelmas]

UE 5 doesn’t come with a scripting language even though there is blueprints which a node editor easy enough to be used by non dev. Studios like embark (The Finals, ARC Raiders) have been successful integrated AngelScript in UE 5 and use it in these games. UE 6 will see the appearance of Verse: the scripting language used for Fortnite (and the end of blueprint at some point). At first I was sad to see yet another language but it is worth looking at the doc to see why and how it makes a lot of sense.

[kibwen]

> The best way to speed it up appears to be organizing a codebase in many crates.

A "crate" in Rust is the unit of compilation. In C, a file is the unit of compilation. Rust just lets you have a compilation unit that's composed of more than one file (without having to resort to C-style textual inclusion). But if you want, you can certainly have one-file-per-crate, just like you would in C. And what's nice about having many crates is that crates forbid circular dependencies, which trivially enables coarse-grained parallelism in the build system. So yes, organizing a large codebase into crates is the best way to achieve parallelism, but that isn't something to be deplored (and strictly controlling circular dependencies is useful for comprehending large codebases in general).

[comex]

The forbidding of circular dependencies is exactly what makes it hard to achieve parallelism! It means you have to draw nice clean module boundaries and split your compilation units there. Clean boundaries sound nice, except… what if the module is getting large? Can you just take half the module, ctrl-x, ctrl-v into a new file, and get faster compilation times without having to do any massive refactors?

In C, usually yes.

In C++, sometimes yes. It depends on how template-heavy the code is, but if you have some discipline you can keep most logic out of headers and thus easily splittable.

In Rust, almost always no, because of circular dependencies. You can try to work around it by adding `dyn Trait` everywhere, but that requires a lot of code changes and comes at big ergonomic costs (and a small runtime cost).

Which is why in practice, Rust compilation units are almost always larger than C++ or C compilation units. Rust can sometimes be competitive with C++ on compilation speed anyway, thanks to a smarter build system and not having to re-parse headers a billion times, but usually it's slower.

[FridgeSeal]

> Can you just take half the module, ctrl-x, ctrl-v into a new file, and get faster compilation times without having to do any massive refactors?…In Rust, almost always no, because of circular dependencies

This feels like a strange, overly-specific complaint. It reads a bit like “When I write entangled code, it’s hard to untangle”. Like, yeah, the only thing that’ll save you from that is…not writing entangled code? I’m not of the opinion that the argument of “yeah but C lets me do whacky stuff” is a particularly strong line.

FWIW, letting a module grow, and then splitting modules up by cut-and-pasting stuff out along natural domain lines generally _is_ how I write Rust. Largely due to how easy it makes it to construct modules and submodules.

[comex]

I addressed some of these points in my reply to a sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48856158

I may have been a little overly specific, since there are other issues besides cycles that also block splitting crates apart, but from what I’ve seen it’s very common for modules within a crate to have cyclic dependencies and therefore not be easily factorable into separate crates.

[baq]

The industry accepted way of handling circular dependencies is to not have them and heavily lint against them in languages which permit them in compilation or runtime.

[comex]

You’re thinking at the wrong scale. Rust allows circular dependencies just fine, within modules in a crate. And it’s extremely common for modules within a crate to have at least some circular dependencies - type X has some method (trait impl of inherent impl) that mentions type Y, and type Y has some method that mentions type X. In fact, I would be surprised if you could name me a single medium-size-or-larger popular crate that doesn’t have at least one cyclic reference between modules! Though, sometimes those cycles are not essential and could be avoided by splitting up modules. But sometimes they are. Either way, in C or C++ those modules would probably be their own compilation units.

That said, you also run into related parallelism blockers without cycles. For example, the orphan rules force most trait impls for a type to be in the same crate as the type definition. Also, a module which has no source-level cycles will often have cycles after monomorphization. In this case, Rust doesn’t prevent you from splitting the code into crates like it does with source-level cycles, but you do lose most of the actual codegen parallelization unless you can switch from generics to trait objects.

[stymaar]

> The rust compiler is very slow.

It's not “very slow”, that's a tired meme. It's slower than it could/should, but complaining about rustc being “very slow” is a clear misrepresentation, especially when everybody seems to have been fine with tsc's historical performance for instance. It could be nice if it was faster indeed, but people claiming it's “very slow” are just showing they never worked with it.

> The best way to speed it up appears to be organizing a codebase in many crates. This is not preferable ergonomics to many.

In this context (where you don't plan on publishing you stuff on crates.io) a “crate” are just a directory at the root of your repo, the ergonomic impact is literally zero.

[OtomotO]

I am using Rust since 2016 productively... before I dabbled with it.

Rust is not compiling any slower than a comparable C++ codebase for me.

It is compiling much slower than a managed language like Kotlin, C# etc. though. Which is an unfair comparison anyway.

The problem with e.g. gamedev is the iteration cycles. It's very creative work and not so much your average engineering job (apart form game engine dev).

But again, that's an unfair comparison, because even in Unity and many if not most other game engines, there is a scripting language that is used for most of the game logic, that doesn't need hyper performance...

Still, when compared to such languages, Rust indeed does compile slowly AND one has to say: Rust is selling itself not only as a safe, blazingly fast systems programming language these days, but it also is used for its type system etc. and then, when you come from a managed language, compile times really suck.

(Although debug builds are better, they are not an option for game dev for example, because the binary is just too slow then... 200fps vs. 20 :X)

[MobiusHorizons]

Why do you think it is not slow? As far as I know the only language that compiles slower is C++, and even then the compilation speeds between c++ and rust seem to be comparable. I believe c, Fortran, zig, C#, Java and golang are all faster compiling languages. That makes rust pretty slow in my book. I get that it doesn’t bother everyone, but that doesn’t change the facts.

[stymaar]

> Why do you think it is not slow?

The average cargo check for the projects I've worked on, usually finish in less than 1 second, with `cargo build` completing in a single digit second (often below 2s), it's not slow by any means.

> I believe c, Fortran, zig, C#, Java and golang are all faster compiling languages.

Sure, but the difference between type checking is 10ms and type checking in 500ms is barely noticeable for a human being anyway, despite the x50 difference.

> That makes rust pretty slow in my book.

“Slow” is a perceptual thing. It doesn't matter if it's slower in absolute benchmark performance. If it doesn't slow you down in your work it's not “slow”.

> As far as I know the only language that compiles slower is C++

Typescript's compiler is much slower than Rust's, but it's plenty fast enough for most people and you almost never see complains about it because it mostly doesn't matter outside of pissing contests.

[iainmerrick]

Typescript's compiler is much slower than Rust's, but it's plenty fast enough for most people and you almost never see complains about it because it mostly doesn't matter

But you have to compile Rust code to run it. You can run TypeScript code without type-checking it. That’s a massive difference in the development workflow.

The new TSC, supposedly 10x faster, will be very pleasant to have but not as much of a game-changer as you might expect. A 10x faster Rust compiler would be incredible.

[stymaar]

> But you have to compile Rust code to run it. You can run TypeScript code without type-checking it. That’s a massive difference in the development workflow.

And yet I'm waiting for TSC every day while almost never thinking about rustc…

> The new TSC, supposedly 10x faster, will be very pleasant to have but not as much of a game-changer as you might expect.

It will be very nice, but I don't expect it to be a game changer, tsc isn't fast but it's fast enough to get the work done, the annoyance is there but it's objectively minimal. Anything else is pointless internet language war.

> A 10x faster Rust compiler would be incredible.

For development? Not really, not for me at least. Against the endless rants about rustc's performance on HN, absolutely.

[muragekibicho]

Compiling my C code with gcc happens in a single eye blink. Changing the format to .cpp and compiling with g++ takes 5 eye blinks. I've never used rust and I can't imagine blinking more than 6 times while waiting for my code to compile.

[kibwen]

And you wouldn't need to, because the Rust compiler is "slow" relative to compilers like Go. Relative to Clang and g++, the Rust compiler is fast.

[zdragnar]

Most people use esbuild or swc or oxc instead of the typescript compiler directly specifically because of how slow tsc is.

In fact tsc was slow enough that it was rewritten into a different language for version 7, with the performance of the compiled output as the primary motivation.

[pjmlp]

Actually it is possible to make C++ compile faster than Rust, because the ecosystem is more friendly towards binary libraries, then besides incremental compilation, you can also get incremental linking.

Additionally there are ways to have interactive code reloading, e.g. Visual Studio and Live++.

Or even a proper REPL, ROOT, CINT, Xeus.

Naturally all things that Rust could also have, only it hasn't been the focus and there are several decades to catch up.

[kelnos]

It depends on what you're comparing it to. It is indeed very slow when compared to a C compiler, or a zig compiler, or even a Java compiler. C++ can be comparable, or slower, or faster, depending on the C++ features used.

Sure, maybe rustc's performance compares favorably to how tsc used to be, but that's not the benchmark most Rust developers (such as myself, for more than 10 years now) care about.

> a “crate” are just a directory at the root of your repo, the ergonomic impact is literally zero.

Nonsense. That's another Cargo.toml to maintain, and another place you might need to add/remove dependencies, and you have to manage the dependency tree among your sub-crates. The ergonomic impact is absolutely not literally zero, and I'd even say it's enough to be annoying.

[jason_s]

Confused here. Are you talking about the execution speed of the compiler's output, or the compilation time itself? Java's compiler is extremely fast, compared to a C compiler. (I haven't used Rust or Zig so I don't have any experience with those.)

[Pay08]

As far as I'm concerned, I already hate the write-compile-run cycle, any further slowdown in that irritates me exponentially.

[vrighter]

it is insanely slow. I regularly need to wait for minutes just for the final crate to compile when compiling some tui program from scratch

[minraws]

As much as I like Rust,

> In this context (where you don't plan on publishing you stuff on crates.io) a “crate” are just a directory at the root of your repo, the ergonomic impact is literally zero.

Is not true, you can't have circular out of crate dependencies. This often means you now need a third crate that's a trait crate, but then you can't implement external traits on external types, so you need bridge crates, and so on.

Rust's limitation of performance requiring lots of crates indeed has real impacts on projects beyond simple hello worlds or trivial cli apps.

Considering it to be a zero impact issue is rather reductive, even in the context of the language's design principles itself.

Rust for all it's good sides has had a lack of interest from core team and energy to drive real valuable changes beyond the nightly blockers into stable, or maybe they are working real hard and the boulders are so hard to move that we can't see any change looking outside in.

Is it justified after the gargantuan effort that was merging Async and GATs? Yes.

But acknowledging the problem doesn't help us solve it.

This is to say, Rust is an amazing labour of love project that seems rather stuck in time due to lack of investment/time/effort or all of the above, I am not sure, but it's moving slower than I would like, at solving the problems Rust developers face everyday.

And yes Rust compiler is slow (very slow is arguable, compared to modern C++ it isn't that bad, but compared to say Go without cgo, its horrid), Cargo is just bad, without proper hermetic builds and stuff, even when I setup sccache for our team and our cache hit rate remained below 20% and most of it was just C++ deps hitting the cache.

Just to be clear Zig builds are quite slow too, especially on windows where debug builds also use llvm.

TBH Zig debug builds on Linux also don't really feel that fast, C still compiles faster for me by a considerable margin.

Either way as someone doing Rust everyday for last 8+ years, 5+ in small/large teams, I have lots of complaints and I am sad, it has been over years of me complaining without nearly enough progress, they have a survey declare ambitions, and then well... things just don't move much.. not nearly as much as I would have expected.

Honestly given I have been a rust dev for over half a decade now, I should instead of commenting here probably be figuring out if I can contribute to Rust to help things along (faster?).

But most meetings and discussions happen at very EU/US centric times, and number of non US/European core contributors in Rust is also rather small(I don't know of one but I hope there are a few) so as someone not in those circles, I don't have the energy to figure out my way in, with my day job.

Tldr; Is Rust the language for the job here, likely. But the question should be why couldn't have been the language Bun was written from the very start. Why does Zig or C++ or C seem so much more productive.

Sorry for ranting about this but this felt a little relevant since you claimed people complaining, are likely people who have never worked with Rust.

[gpm]

The comment you're replying to wasn't arguing rust > GCed languages (e.g. C# or whatever game dev language you are thinking of). It was arguing rust > non-GC non-safe languages (e.g. zig).

[leecommamichael]

I see that now, thanks. There's a lot to say here, especially with other approaches to memory management. My overall goal was to give them some context that wasn't their own.

[IshKebab]

> The rust compiler is very slow.

It was very slow. It's gotten a lot faster over time (over 2x faster). It's still not exactly fast, but it's definitely faster than C++. Although C++'s slow compile times are often complained about they were never really enough to stop most people using it, including for games.

> a garbage collector eliminates a large amount of defects (including the ones stated in the article) without any added friction

I'd be careful about that "without any added friction". Rust's lifetime/borrowing system tends to lead to less buggy code because it encourages structuring code in a less spaghetti way. GC does eliminate memory errors but you also lose that non-spaghetti code structure.

[pjmlp]

Because contrary to Rust, C and C++ have a culture of binary libraries.

You are seldom compiling the world from scratch.

Especially in the platforms dear to game devs.

[IshKebab]

> You are seldom compiling the world from scratch.

True in Rust too though - you're normally doing incremental compiles. And even though you're compiling the world, it's still on par with C++. For example I just tried compiling a hello world Bevy project, which has 462 crate dependencies - pretty big. It took 2m20. Totally reasonable to build an entire game engine and all it's dependencies.

I wish they had reported the compile time of Bun before/after the Rust port - that would have been very interesting.

[pjmlp]

Yeah but compiling full Unreal from scratch already requires going down the path of forking it for own purposes.

Same applies to most commercial libraries, where code is usually provided for debugging purposes, not for building everything from scratch.

Also incremental linking on Rust, or hot code reloading is still not something that works out of the box.

How beefy is that machine to achieve 2m20? I started using C++ on MS-DOS, on a 20 MHz 386SX PC with 2MB RAM and 20 MB HDD.

Especially relevant in current times.

[IshKebab]

> How beefy is that machine to achieve 2m20?

Ryzen 9 3950X (16 core). I think it was top of the line 5 or 6 years ago but it only cost me about £300 second hand for the whole PC (with 128 GB RAM - before the RAMpocalypse!) Definitely not a crazy machine.

> I started using C++ on MS-DOS, on a 20 MHz 386SX PC with 2MB RAM and 20 MB HDD

Yeah, I mean early C++ was quite a lot simpler than modern C++23! Of course it's going to compile way faster. You're not compiling UE 5 on that machine! Compilers didn't have so many slow optimisations back then either.

[vlovich123]

For what it’s worth game devs often use C# or C++ engines which have even worse issues. Rust also has the early beginnings of hot reload which bevy adopted if I recall correctly [1]. I still think a higher level language is good for “business” logic to orchestrate how efficient low-level pieces connect, but Rust is holding its own even against those use cases IMHO.

[1] https://docs.rs/hot-lib-reloader/latest/hot_lib_reloader/

[Rohansi]

> For what it’s worth game devs often use C# or C++ engines which have even worse issues.

Such as? You can't be referring to hot reload alone because you can already do that in both C++ and C#.

[vlovich123]

Well for c++ memory safety and sharp abstractions and even worse compile times than Rust. I’m not aware of hot reload really being done in c++ at any scale but I’m not a game dev so I’m open to learning.

C# AFAIK holds a minor place in gamedev and also has slow compile times maybe? I assume it has better support for hot reload times. But generally the performance profile isn’t there for the most demanding games even if the DX is.

[Rohansi]

It's not specific to game dev but Visual Studio has hot reload for C++ that you should be able to make use of.

C# compile times are fast. Performance is a lot better than you probably think, especially with modern .NET (not what Unity uses).

[vlovich123]

Visual Studio limitations around hot reload are quite unrealistic for any serious codebase and only work on Windows with Visual Studio when you started it under a debugger.

Rust’s hot reload is cross platform if I recall correctly and is always available until you disable it from the build (eg debug on, release off). It also has a better story for working around the limitations that Visual Studio just throws up on.

C++ hot reload is not a common experience in the ecosystem.

[thayne]

> Beside that, for many problems, a garbage collector eliminates a large amount of defects (including the ones stated in the article)

Languages with garbage collection are generally considered "memory safe". GP was talking about choosing a language that requires manual memory management, but doesn't have something like rust's lifetimes to catch things like use-after-free.

[psychoslave]

Hey thanks for teaching me a word today, and to be finicky myself, the convention seems to be to use a single n it. :)

[Gigachad]

I've observed that dumber models are able to vibecode in safe languages a lot easier since the compiler errors can self correct the models hallucinations, while they end up marking a task as complete in dynamic languages despite it not actually working.

If I'm vibe coding something I'm always just going to do it in Rust.

[sneak]

Agree 100%. Almost everything I have written with AI is in Go, and strong typing is really really nice (as is go vet and golangci-lint to keep the generated code in line).

I imagine writing plain js or python with it would be much much riskier.

[ubercore]

Well annotated code is fine in Python too.

[flohofwoe]

> and you decide to drop to down to C++

Going from Rust to C++ seems a strange choice, since you get most of the same problems just without memory safety. Zig, Odin, C3 or even plain old C though? At least those languages have things to offer that neither Rust nor C++ provide (and if it's just compilation speed).

[pjmlp]

Market share, IDE and graphics tooling, and industry standards.

LLVM is not going to take PRs written in Rust to fix the Rust compiler backend, for example.

Neither are OpenJDK, .NET, V8, JSCore going to take such PRs.

By the way, LLVM and GCC would also not take PRs written in C.

[flohofwoe]

'Industry standards' is where programming languages go to die ;)

As for PRs: well yeah of course, when in Rome...

[pjmlp]

C has been doing quite well with industry standards like UNIX/POSIX, OpenGL, Vulkan, VFX, OpenMP,..

Same applies to C++ with CUDA, SYSCL, HPC/HFT frameworks, LLVM/GCC, AI compilers,...

They don't look dead to me, even if we as industry could be much better by now.

[henry_bone]

I'll bite. The first language I could "just write" in was C. I had internalised the language and its standard lib and didn't need the internet to work with it.

Rust is pushed by many as the replacement to C, because of the memory safety guarantees. I'm sympathetic. I worked with Haskell for a time, so I get it. But Rust seems quite complex. There are so many language features that there's memes about it. There's also the friction and learning curve.

So, for fun, I choose zig because, like C, I can hold most of the language in my head and "just write." I choose zig because it does a great deal to help me write correct and highly performant code. I can use arena allocators and defer and cure my code of many memory issues. Then there's the various language rules around pointers (optionals, slices, etc) that help me write correct code. There's the built in testing and the test allocator. I love that comptime and the build system are not special cases, but rather are just garden variety zig. I love the simplicity and elegance of it all.

I also choose zig because I prefer the liberty it affords me. I am responsible for each and every allocation. It appeals to my libertarian sensiblities.

[baq]

> The first language I could "just write" in was C. I had internalised the language and its standard lib and didn't need the internet to work with it.

I bet $4.20 you didn’t write C. You wrote something C-like which the compiler didn’t reject because the C standard has a gigantic surface of ‘undefined behavior’ which means once your program does one thing out of spec it isn’t C anymore silently.

[kibwen]

> There are so many language features that there's memes about it.

Like many memes, these are misleading. Rust is a solidly medium-sized language; smaller than Python, certainly, though with a perilously steeper learning curve than Python.

[flohofwoe]

Rust-the-language may be medium-sized. Rust-the-stdlib though?

The Rust stdlib has a lot of essential low-level types needed for adding a 'semantic layer' on top of the language so that the language user can exactly 'express intent' (types that arguably should be language features instead). Just look at all those detailed methods needed to make RefCell work, and what does 'into_inner' or 'undo_leak' even mean?

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/cell/struct.RefCell.html

E.g. what's a single concept in C (e.g. "the pointer") easily has a dozen specialized equivalents in Rust, just because Rust needs the additional information to do its memory safety magic correctly.

The entirety of Rust and its stdlib has a huge 'semantic surface' compared to most other languages (even C++), and I think this difference in the semantic surface size to other languages is exactly the one thing that either attracts or repels people to/from Rust ;)

[khuey]

> what's a single concept in C (e.g. "the pointer") easily has a dozen specialized equivalents in Rust

That "the pointer" is a single concept in C is the root cause of absurd numbers of bugs over the history of C.

The questions of how long the memory a pointer points to lives, what threads it is safe to access from, and how it is allocated and destroyed all still exist in C. Those answers are just implicit rather than explicit like they are in Rust. It's not like Python/etc where you don't have to worry about these things.

[flohofwoe]

In general I agree, but this topic is IMHO exactly what separates the Rust lovers from the Rust haters ;) E.g. how strong is too strong when it comes to type systems. Rust afficionados generally seem to tend towards 'the stronger the better', and accepting the downside of a fairly rigid code base.

I prefer a middle ground between strong and weak typing (but yeah, C is arguably too weakly typed, but the exact sweet spot is different for every programmer).

A reasonably smart C compiler that has visibility on all code in a project could theoretically infer a lot of the same semantic details that must be manually provided in Rust by looking at how the pointer is used in the wider codebase (basically what static analyzers are doing by reconstructing control flows). Of course such an extensive analysis would result in even worse compile times than Rust ;)

[pdimitar]

Of all the things I expected to read today on HN, "I chose a programming language that appeals to my political leanings" was certainly not one of them.

[henry_bone]

With the use of quotes there, you've put those words in my mouth. I didn't say that.

What I am trying to express with the statement you refer to is that zig appeals to me on an aesthetic level. It suits my tastes.

I mentioned liberty because I appreciate that zig allows me to have complete control of memory allocations, and gives me quite a deal of control over the metal. I like this and I like that I don't have to appease a borrow checker. Zig's compiler and type system is strict enough to guide me to correctness, but the experience, broadly, is not so onerous that programming becomes tedious and frustrating.

These qualities, I suspect, resonate with my individualistic tendencies.

[pdimitar]

With respect, it's difficult to interpret "libertarian sensiblities" as something else than "political leanings". Now "liberal" is a much more general -- I wouldn't necessarily call that political -- but what you said had a strong political connotation, hence my comment.

Your explanation lands otherwise. I can't relate to "I don't have to appease a borrow checker" though. That reads like a deliberately uncharitable read of what Rust's compiler is doing. That being said, it's definitely not for everyone.

I tried Zig. Loved it. But then after a few weekends I said to myself: "Wait a bit. I've been down this path before with C and C++. I know exactly where it ends." -- and bailed.

To me these days low-level programming is basically: either go all the way, or don't go at all. Sadly Rust is not like, going really all the way, but it's IMO the closest we got. And before somebody starts enumerating obscure languages that barely have a community: I include multi-axial evaluation here i.e. PL features, stdlib, ecosystem, richness of education (Rust has _a lot_ of good books and courses), and others I am surely forgetting at the moment.

Zig is great. But I'll not take marginal improvements anymore. Not in my personal life and not in my work. I'll get big ones, or not get them.

Since we are explaining philosophies, now without political undertones: that's mine.

[josephg]

> I can understand when you need the absolute best performance and you decide to drop to down to C++

Rust is just as fast as C++.

[lionkor]

It depends just how fast you need it. C++ is much easier to get to zero abstraction code.

In Rust you are constantly fighting the stdlib and other libraries, and you have to litter your hot code with unsafe blocks to get it to stop adding a branch to nearly every object access, be it for bounds checks or over/underflow checks.

C++ does a much better job at giving you a zero abstraction API, and you can always drop down to raw pointers if you want, without(!!!!) unsafe blocks and weird tricks. Of course it's unsafe in C++ but the friction to writing a branchless hot loop is muuuuch smaller.

When profiling and optimizing Rust code, I very often find myself poring over the generated code, making small changes, reading api docs, and trying again, much more than in C++. Lots of unsafe Rust APIs are not even nearly good enough, even with most checks turned off you will find branches that just branch to panic!(), which is, you guessed it, still more code and a branch than the code would suggest.

I get why people think that most systems languages are the same "speed", but they really are not if you are hitting limits of the hardware in your hot loops.

[imtringued]

How is not having to mark your unsafe code as unsafe a good thing?

You couldn't have come up with something more incomprehensible.

If 99% of your code doesn't use unsafe, why contaminate 100% of your code base with footguns?

[afiori]

I agree with your point, but for completeness:

> How is not having to mark your unsafe code as unsafe a good thing?

The problem with unsafe code in Rust is that IIRC nobody actually figured out yet the "rules" of unsafe i.e. which invariants you can stretch and which can cause UB. My (not super up to date) understanding is that this is an active area of research and progress is being made and also that in practice there are many well understood usages.

In short unsafe rust is somewhat worse than C++ as the boundaries of UB are less well understood/defined

[josephg]

I don’t know what you’re referring to. Unsafe seems pretty well defined for 99% of use cases. Unsafe blocks allow you to dereference raw pointers and call unsafe functions. Thats about it. Remarkably, even in codebases which need a lot of unsafe (eg the kernel), almost all code is safe code.

[afiori]

What I mean is that unsafe code allows you to eg break std invariants (set invalid length to Vec, unlock a locked mutex, etc.) in ways that can be UB, which of these are UB and which can be used "safely" is sort of unknown.

For better or worse they are much more well understood in C as they are front and center of the language semantics

[hkalbasi]

> over/underflow checks.

Integer overflows are not checked in release builds by default, since they are not related to memory safety.

On the other hand, rust emits noalias everywhere, which helps in autovectorization.

[josephg]

Yep. And array bounds checks have a miniscule performance impact at runtime because they're so friendly to branch prediction.

[lionkor]

It depends what kind of hot loop you have.

[josephg]

If you have a hot loop where it matters, you can put an assert outside the loop which lets llvm remove the bounds checks. Or use unsafe { get_unchecked() } to remove the bounds check entirely.

[yukIttEft]

Is it though.

There are so many situations where something is guaranteed to be safe but there is no way to express that in the Rust typesystem, so the only thing you can do is to wrap everything in Arcs and Mutexes, which introduces allocations, pointerchasing and locks

[iknowstuff]

Hard to imagine a scenario where you don’t need a mutex for correctness and yet somehow Rust forces you to do it?

Unless maybe you mean tokio’s work stealing executor, but you can just not use it.

[josephg]

I said rust is just as fast as C++. Not safe rust. Use unsafe where it’s appropriate, obviously.

[afiori]

Just use unsafe then

[m00dy]

yeap, unfortunately, only few can see this.

[flohofwoe]

It depends a lot on the coding style. The sort of Rust code that's heavy on Rc, Arc, Box, RefCell etc... (e.g. the typical band-aids to work around borrow checker restrictions) will be slower than typical C++ code (it's also possible to kill performance in C++ of course, just use std::shared_ptr for everything). E.g. I'd wager that performant Rust code is trickier to write than performant C++ code because you'll have to design your entire Rust codebase around borrow checker restrictions, while C++ lets you 'cheat' without having to fall back to helper types that incur runtime overhead.

[lostglass]

It's not though. It's fast enough for many applications but if you need to write a hypervisor then suddenly bounds checks and atomic pointers become significant. Not to mention that rust dramatically reduces your ability to control where memory is allocated.

I write in rust and c++, rust isn't as fast. Rust is easier to work with and, compared to the Java crap it's replacing at my work, it's a lot better but it's certainly not zero cost abstractions the way c++ can be, nor is it great for data oriented design because you're hoping the compiler will do the right thing, consistently.

[frizlab]

My personal memory and concurrent-safe option is Swift. And I agree, choosing a non-memory safe language for a new project is close to irresponsible today…

[pjmlp]

Sometimes we have no option, given the industry standards that expect C or C++.

Khronos, Open Group, NVidia, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo... aren't going to change their APIs and SDKs, just because of social media discussions on the merits of C, C++ vs other safer alternatives.

I agree we should minimise their use, however not everyone accepts a dual language approach, nor there are alternatives in such domains, even if they technically exist, you still need to overcome the human and political factors.

Hence why it is so relevant to fix C and C++ security flaws to some extent as well.

[frizlab]

Obviously my comment of irresponsibility was “given that there is a choice.”

Though that’s one nice thing about Swift: it has a very good interop’ with C now, and a “starting to get pretty good” interop’ with C++. So that can help, sometimes. (Obviously, I reiterate, I understand there are situations where the choice is just not possible, and enhancing C and C++ is indeed a good thing.)

[pjmlp]

The nice thing about Swift, or Java/Kotlin on Android, is the platform owner attitude, either adopt it, or go elsewhere, that is the only way safety improvements are pushed into mainstream.

[rootlocus]

Im constantly surprised by the disk size required by rust builds. It takes over 50G to compile zed IIRC.

[egorfine]

> and human involvement

Isn't ironic for a project that successfully killed all past and future human involvement?

[testdelacc1]

> I can understand when you need the absolute best performance and you decide to drop to down to C++

Could you help me understand with an example or two? My understanding is that well written Rust and C++ are often identical in performance thanks to relying on the same compiler backend (both clang and rustc use LLVM).

[aldanor]

Even, possibly, the other way around in some cases. A seemingly identical program may (and it does occur) compile to a faster machine code in rust than in C++ due to extra markers (eg alignment) that rust compiler is able to provide to llvm.

[andrepd]

This comment makes no sense. For one, "you need the absolute best performance and you decide to drop to down to C++", no, C++ and Rust are virtually equivalent in that they pretty much expose the underlying machine fully; if anything Rust makes it easier to write idiomatic performant code.

For two, there are plenty of reasons to use C++ unfortunately: compatibility with existing code based and availability of developers to name two.

[pjmlp]

The main reason to use C++, and Rust compiler also falls into it, is existing infrastructure, SDKs and industry standards.

I would love that Java and .NET would provide all layers like several managed languages in the 90's,

However it has taken a quarter century to get back features we already had in Modula-3, Mesa, Oberon and co.

[canbus]

People get attached to things they've been using for decades. Also most of the world is still written in c/c++ so any critical mass has quite a lot to go up against.

Rust isn't perfect but it solves a lot of the pitfalls of C++ (not just UB, package management, horrible cmake files, linker errors etc.)

[randypewick]

Rust is C++ like language, with more safety. It makes no sense to say that to get performance one can drop down to C++. As far as I am aware, you can get as fast as C with Rust. Of course, that might mean to compromise on something, some bound checks, some code ergonomics, or something else. You can write ASM in Rust, so it really gets as low level as it gets. And what I find amazing is that, similarity to C++, you can get both low level and high level code in the same language. And this is intrinsic in the language complexity: if you take a simpler language with a less powerful type system (C-class languages), you lose this ability.

[xiaoyu2006]

Ownership is a very limiting coding constraint, and bypassing methods, when ultimately needed (e.g. cell), cannot be engineered to be ergonomical.

[fulafel]

Fortunately there are also many other memory safe languages to choose from.

[sitzkrieg]

rust is still a non starter in some niche embedded applications (way too big). i still write c and assembly constantly.

[steveklabnik]

> way too big

https://github.com/tormol/tiny-rust-executable

This produces a 137 byte binary. Obviously AMD64 isn't used in embedded, but I've seen ARM ones that are in the ~256 range.

It's all in how you use it. Of course, if you don't care about binary sizes, they can get large, but that's very different than actually paying attention to what you're doing.

[whytevuhuni]

I tried to use Rust for a tiny microcontroller (GD32VF103, 128KB flash).

First of all, I was amazed by how much I could do with Rust (safe Rust, even), and how well it was interfacing with my handwritten RISC-V assembly. I will definitely use Rust again for the next such project.

But, every time my functions would get over a certain size, suddenly some optimizations stopped working, and Rust was trying to put the whole panic/fmt machinery into the thing, going above my linker's flash size limit. It was insanely frustrating, since there was no rhyme or reason to it. Simply adding another branch to a match made it do that. Or another if statement that was exactly the same as the 4 before it.

The 137 binary thing does not scale.

[pjmlp]

On that universe you would be better off with BASIC or Pascal compilers than Rust, which would already be safer than C, while offering similar sizes.

Mikroe has C, Pascal and BASIC compilers for all kinds of microcontrollers, that is their main market.

[steveklabnik]

I don't disagree that I think that the Rust project could do more to make this kind of development easier, and it is true that it doesn't come for free. That doesn't change the point that if you want to, you can do it, it is not a fundamental language limitation.

[whytevuhuni]

It is a fundamental language limitation, unless you want to claim that the core library (or rather what's left when using no_std) is not part of the language.

The problem comes from a combination of three things:

1. Rust's standard library (including core) likes to panic a lot, e.g. for code that is genuinely unreachable (and this is fine)

2. Rust/LLVM cannot always optimize unreachable code away (and this is also fine)

3. The presence of at least one panic causes Rust to also include the error string format machinery, which is HUGE (and this is completely unavoidable)

Because of #2, there is no way to prevent this for larger code. I can define my own panic handler, but I can't prevent panic!() calls from inside core from constructing the format message using core::fmt before they call my panic handler.

And so any non-trivial code sometimes just randomly becomes 3x larger, and I can no longer fit it on my MCU, despite never actually printing or caring about any panic messages.

[steveklabnik]

I think we just disagree about what "fundamental" means. If you don't use panics, you don't get the machinery. This means it's not fundamental.

What you're talking about is the ease of which you can not include the panic machinery. I agree that it is not always easy to keep out, and that I would like if it were to be made easier.

But people are doing real, commercial projects on MCUs your size and smaller.

[swiftcoder]

> niche embedded applications

How niche are we talking? Rust is deployed on a bunch of popular microcontrollers at this point

[OtomotO]

> I can understand when you need the absolute best performance and you decide to drop to down to C++

What? Rust generally doesn't have worse performance to C++, so this argument makes no sense at all to me.

> and I also relate with just personal preference, but beyond those it seems a no brainer to me.

That's another argument altogether.

It's totally fine to have preferences and decide to go with them of course.

[ryukoposting]

tl;dr: my job requires me to do things where Rust's memory model can't save me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48833867

[rvrb]

that you understand and think dropping down to C++ is what you need to do when you "need the best performance" is quite enough of a tell to invalidate the rest of your opinion here. if you "need the best performance", you need to ditch OOP and RAII, and you're probably reaching for C. Zig wants to be the better choice there. that's a perfectly reasonable niche for a language to exist in.

if you read the article carefully, jarred is pretty clear about how their specific requirements with Bun cause friction when bridging the manual memory management of Zig with a garbage collected JS runtime. at face value, that makes quite a lot of sense to me, and it's a pretty specific scenario that is not the full on condemnation of memory unsafe languages that your comment is.

[gmadsen]

It is widely accepted that you can get better performance with c++ far easier than C. Outside of custom rolling assembly , a large aspect of performance tuning is compile time optimization, which is extremely non trivial in C, while being supported in language with C++. All the things people associate with C performance can be done in C++, the converse is not true

[remexre]

the point of c++ when you need max perf is to be able to maintain the compile-time abstractions you need w/ templates instead of macros and undocumented optimizer behavior, not oop or raii

[rvrb]

you're right that that is a weak argument against C++ in that use case (biased by my own dislike of the language); but it is also a niche that Zig fits into quite well. so it's weird for the OP to claim it's ok to drop down to C++ when needed while kind of suggesting they don't get why anyone would use Zig

[galangalalgol]

If you are willing to hand code intrinsics it doesn't really matter what language you pick from a performance perspective. Rust consistently shows it has better performance than c++ in code that does not hand code intrinsics. If cpu(not gpu) based performance is all you care about there is no reason to pick anything but rust. Modern c++ devs have no trouble with the borrow checker either they are already doing all the things that keep it from complaining. The reasons someone might not pick rust involve integration with existing code, the complexity of the language, and the depth of it's dependency trees. The complexity argument certainly doesn't lean you towards c++ or probably anything with an llvm back end. The openbsd approach to c is probably as simple as you can get these days short of forth or something equally obscure. Dependency trees are deceptive. We all have deeper trees than we think we do, but the rust front end itself has well over 100 crates in its tree...

All that said, I use rust for everything.