[OT] Safer C

[Gregor Mückl]

On Thursday, 21 November 2024 at 18:43:51 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>>"I was actually interim chairman of the Rust committee at the 
>>Motion Picture Academy last summer," he said. "And it's an 
>>interesting language and I enjoyed playing with it, but I was 
>>like, I just can't imagine having to rewrite all my software in 
>>this."
>
> Quote of the day, lol.

I think that there is a quite common sentiment these days that 
(a) rust solves a few painful problems nicely, but (b) is too 
impractical to use at scale.

My prediction right now is that rust won't overtake any of the 
major languages. Here's why:

- There is a genuine drive to build a successor that interacts 
much more nicely with existing code in C and C++. Especially C++ 
seems to be in this weird spot where it is at the same time a 
major improvement over C to be worth using, but also starting to 
overstay its welcome in many teams.

- Nobody is going to rewrite the world just to get more control 
over memory bugs. Old code that works is perfectly fine and 
mostly not a liability in that regard (caveats apply).

- People want good interop with their existing code when 
introducing a new language. This isn't a big issue with C, but 
any more advanced C++ library, for example, is hard to bind to 
other compiled languages. Some features can't be bound at all 
unless the target language makes special provisions to enable it 
(see C++ interop in D and Swift, also C++/CLI).

Rust will probably have its lunch eaten the moment a language 
comes along that
- is as fast as rust or C++,
- has memory guarantees on par with rust (not necessarily a 
carbon copy of the rust borrow checker),
- and can interop with more modern languages than C with less 
friction than rust can.

I assume that there are enough dev leads out there that would 
literally throw money at such a solution with both hands, so it's 
bound to happen eventually.

[Also, stupid pet peeve: "memory safety" is the wrong name for 
what rust accomplishes in my head. I associate "safety" with 
functional safety, which rust doesn't solve at all.]