Introducing tmux-rs

I like this post, one can learn a lot.

It seems automatically translating Rust to C is not a very good idea: "I threw away all of the C2Rust output and decided I would translate all of the files into Rust manually from C.". Neither seems doing it manually: "I introduced many bugs while translating the code. I’d like to share the process of discovering and fixing a couple." Or using AI: "That’s because when using cursor to translate the code it would still occasionally insert bugs, just like me. So, I spent as much time reviewing the generated code as it would have taken me to write it myself."

As a hobby project, all power to you. But otherwise, maybe better not rewrite working code....

> But otherwise, maybe better not rewrite working code....

Except that the eventual result allows for extension and improvements in a memory-safe language.

There seems to be some rather irrational obsession about this.

Things can seem irrational when you don't understand them.

Another comment in this thread hoped for "a brand new bulletproof tmux-resurrect". The reason there's a desire for such things is closely related to the limitations of non-trivial programs written in C.

They're harder to extend without bugs, harder for new team members to understand, and so on.

The "irrational obsession" has to do with advancing the state of the art beyond a primitive high-level assembler that was developed in the 1970s.

> developed in the 1970s.

It was born in the 1970s and was standardized in the 80s and 90s. It continues to develop. Numerous data types have been added, along with unicode and threads. The C23 standard was released last year.

You can say something similar about COBOL and FORTRAN. C's fundamental flaws aren't being fixed, because that would require a new language.

There comes a point at which it becomes necessary to move on.

What's wrong with FORTRAN?

It’s hard to actually define what Fortran means. There’s features in the standard that are not portable, and many portable features that are not standard. It’s kind of a mess, and getting worse.

FORTRAN means what it's always meant. The standard is a guide for the implementor. The user needs to code to the implementation.

It's a different way of thinking about languages than most people usually do, but it's been true for FORTRAN since the 1950s and is true to some extent of every language with multiple implementations today.