In Defense of C++

I would really like to see more people who have never written C++ before port a Rust program to C++. In my opinion, one can argue it may be easy to port initially but it is an order of magnitude more complex to maintain.

Whereas the other around, porting a C++ program to Rust without knowing Rust is challenging initially (to understand the borrow checker) but orders of magnitude easier to maintain.

Couple that with easily being about to `cargo add` dependencies and good language server features, and the developer experience in Rust blows C++ out of the water.

I will grant that change is hard for people. But when working on a team, Rust is such a productivity enhancer that should be a no-brainer for anyone considering this decision.

I'm a developer since 30 years. I program C#, Rust, Java, some TS etc. I can probably go to most repositories on github and at least clone and build them. I have failed - repeatedly - to build even small C++ libraries despite reasonable effort. And that's not even _writing any C++_. Just installing the tooling around CMake etc is completely Kafkaesque.

The funniest thing happened when I needed to compile a C file as part of a little Rust project, and it turned out one of the _easiest_ ways I've experienced of compiling a tiny bit of C (on Windows) was to put it inside my Rust crate and have cargo do it via a C compiler crate.

Most of the C++ world has standardized on CMake.

I work on large C++ projects with 1-2 dozen third party C and C++ library dependencies, and they're all built from source (git submodules) as part of one CMake build.

It's not easy but it is fairly simple.

> Couple that with easily being about to `cargo add` dependencies and good language server features, and the developer experience in Rust blows C++ out of the water.

Exactly this. Regardless of safety, expressiveness, control, whatever argument someone pulls from their hat to defend C++ the simple fact of a solid dependency manager cannot be overstated.