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White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe (www.whitehouse.gov)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).

On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I like Rust a lot, philosophically and functionally... but it is WAY harder. Undeniably very hard.

Just try and do anything with, say, a linked list. It's mind-boggling how hard it is to make basic things work without just cloning tons of values, using obnoxious patterns like .as_mut(), or having incredibly careful and deliberate patterns of take-ing values, Not to mention the endless use of shit like Boxes that just generates frustrating boilerplate.

I still think it's a good language and valuable to learn/use, and it's incredibly easy to create performant applications in it once you mastered the basics, but christ.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

It's mind-boggling how hard it is to make basic things work

It's mind-boggling how broken basic things are.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I have not encountered anything broken, aside from maybe binary app docstring stuff (e.g., automated example testing).

On the contrary, everything seems precise, reliable, and trustworthy. That's the thing to really like about Rust -- you can be pretty much fearless in it. It's just difficult. I die a bit in time any time I have a return type that looks like Box<dyn Fn(&str) -> Result<Vec<String>, CustomError>> or some shit . Honestly, the worst thing about Rust is probably that you have to manually specify heap vs stack when the compiler could easily make those determinations itself 99% of the time based on whether something is sized.