[OT] Safer C

[Paulo Pinto]

On Saturday, 23 November 2024 at 01:11:46 UTC, Gregor Mückl wrote:
> 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.]

That language will arrive too late for what is already happening 
at Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Cloudflare, Vercel, 
Facebook, Activision, Capcom,....