Eurydice: a Rust to C compiler

I use Rust and C at work. I quite enjoy Rust, but I currently have no reason to believe C won't outlive it, by a lot.

> I currently have no reason to believe C won't outlive it, by a lot.

My reaction is kind of: "So what?" I really don't care about the relative lives of languages and don't really understand why anyone would. Unless I am wrong, there is still lots of COBOL we wish wasn't COBOL? And that reality doesn't sound like a celebration of COBOL?

IMHO it would be completely amazing if magically something 10x better than Rust came along tomorrow, and I'd bet most Rust people would agree. Death should be welcomed after a well lived life.

To me, the more interesting question is -- what if efforts like c2rust, Eurydice, TRACTOR and/or LLMs make translations more automatic and idiomatic? Maybe C will exist, but no one will be "writing" C in 20 years? Perhaps C persists like the COBOL zombie? Perhaps this zombification is a fate worse than death? Perhaps C becomes like Latin. Something students loath and are completely bored with, but are forced to learn simply as the ancient interface language for the next millennia.

Is that winning? I'd much rather people were excited about tech/a language/a business/vibrant community, than, whatever it is, simply persisted, and sometimes I wish certain C people could see that.

Honestly I'd be a bit disappointed if something better came along tomorrow. Just as we as an industry spent all this effort moving to Rust something better comes along? Lame. Obviously I want better languages to come out, but I'd either want a bit of warning or a slower pace so we as an industry don't totally "waste" tons of time on transitioning between short-lived languages. Thankfully languages need about 10 years to mature from 0.1 to production readiness, and industry happily ignores marginally (and moderately) better languages than what they're using, so this is not a realistic issue.

If all Rust accomplishes is ushering some other better project, it would have been worth it.

I think it would take a while for that to happen, purely due to momentum' the same thing that makes some people think that Rust isn't being used will affect any younger language just as much, if not more.

I think that there's an easier language than Rust struggling to come out of it, but if Rust had been that easier language with different compromises, I doubt it would have gained critical mass that allowed it to get where it is today. Being fast and safe meant it carved a niche in a "free square" that drove it to have a clear differentiator that allowed it to gain an initial audience. I also suspect that it is easier toale a language fast and then evolve it to make it easier to use, than it is to make it easy to use first and then make it fast.