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Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

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611 points LorenDB | 1 comments | 06 May 25 17:51 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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choeger ◴[07 May 25 06:42 UTC] No.43912866[source]▶
All this has been known in the PL design community for decades if not half a century by now.

Two things are incredibly frustrating when it comes to safety in software engineering:

1. The arrogance that "practitioners" have against "theorists" (everyone with a PhD in programming languages)

2. The slowness of the adoption of well-tested and thoroughly researched language concepts (think of Haskell type classes, aka, Rust traits)

I like that Rust can pick good concepts and design coherent language from them without inventing its own "pragmatic" solution that breaks horribly in some use cases that some "practitioners" deem "too theoretical."

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blub ◴[07 May 25 14:31 UTC] No.43916215[source]▶
If the practitioners haven’t adopted what you’re offering for 50+ years, that thing can’t be good.

Rust is also struggling with its “too theoretical” concepts by the way. The attempts of the community to gaslight the practitioners that the concepts are in fact easy to learn and straightforward are only enjoying mild success, if I may call it that.

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1. db48x ◴[07 May 25 14:56 UTC] No.43916562[source]▶
I disagree. The advertising and hype pushing people to use C++ is insane. There are hundreds of magazines that exist solely to absorb the advertising budget of Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Intel). Hundreds of conferences every year. You could be writing code in ML at your startup with no complaints and demonstrable success but as soon as your company gets big enough to send your CEO to an industry conference you’ll be switching to C++. The in–flight magazine will extol the benefits of MSVC, speakers like Matt Godbolt will preach Correct by Construction in C++, etc, etc. By the time he gets back he’s been brainwashed into thinking that C++ is the next best thing.