[comex]

> 1 - If memory management is a serious problem for the software you work on, I've never found the boost library lacking.

A key feature of Rust is being memory safe by default without sacrificing too much performance. In C++ it's not really possible to be completely safe, and pretty much all real-world C++ I've seen doesn't even come close to that ideal, using raw pointers frequently; the result is that crashes can be relatively mysterious and, perhaps more importantly, that in large C++ codebases with lots of attack surface, like browsers, security vulnerabilities are extremely frequent. So yes, memory management is a serious problem.

In particular, there is no way to replicate Rust-style borrowed pointers in C++, which make safe low-level programming easier.

> 4 - the Rust switch statement don't fall through... This one was truly mind blowing. The one useful feature of switch statement got ripped it out! If you don't really need the fall through, I'd just avoid using them completely...

Most C++ code uses switch frequently, usually without taking advantage of fallthrough. Rust match is good for this, but it can also be used for more complex things (destructuring); using this frequently makes for code that looks quite different from C++.

> The main reason I'm consistently happy with using C++ (and why I put up with the header files) is that everything is available.

The bad news: as Rust is still a very unstable language, there isn't much of a library ecosystem.

The good news: by release, Rust will have a standard package manager, which should make importing libraries easier than in C and C++ where every package has its own build system. I think Go has been pretty successful with this approach.

> Since Rust seems so close to C++, does this mean that linking to C++ code is trivial?

Nope... I would personally like this feature, although it would be difficult to make reliable because Rust has different semantics in various areas - OOP is very different, templates are (intentionally) not as powerful, etc.

However, you can import C headers using rust-bindgen [1] and fairly easily link to C code.

https://github.com/crabtw/rust-bindgen

[bambam12897]

Thanks for taking the time to address my questions. Memory management hasn't been a major stumbling block in my line of work, but I'll read up and give it a whirl if I have the appropriate project.

[ahy1]

> Most C++ code uses switch frequently, usually without taking advantage of fallthrough.

I am not so sure about this. Thinking back on my uses of switch in C and C++, I am not able to remember using switch without taking advantage of fallthrough. Maybe I am just not a typical C++ programmer...

[dbaupp]

Rust still offers an equivalent to things like

  switch (x) {
  case 0: case 1: foo(); break;
  case 2: case 3: bar(); break;
  default: baz();
  }

in the form of

  match x { 
      0 | 1 => foo(),
      2 | 3 => bar(),
      _ => baz()
  }

In any case, Rust's match is so much more powerful than switch, offering (nested) pattern matching like Haskell's `case`.

[DerekL]

There's two different kinds of fallthrough in C++. The most common is using the same code for multiple values. Rust already supports this by allowing multiple values and ranges of values for each pattern.

The much more rare use of fallthrough is executing code for one case, and then continuing on to execute the code for the next case. This seems to be much more rare. In fact, in my large Android application, I turned on warnings for this type of fallthrough, and out of hundreds of switch statements, only eight used it, and all but one was a mistake.