this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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Rust lobbyists winning

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's just the obvious thing. C and C++ don't have safeguards against dangerous programming mistakes. Programming languages exist that do. There are to this day still software vulnerabilities being caused by subtly incorrect code that C and C++ require being treated as legitimate.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

C and C++ don't have safeguards against dangerous programming mistakes.

This is not really true for modern C++... and if you're talking about code bases that use an ancient dialect of C++ where it might be true, the fantasy of even having the option of porting to Rust is actually pretty laughable. C will continue to be necessary for many critical things because there simply isn't sufficient compiler support coverage for Rust to take the throne.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The difference here is that it takes discipline and training to use only those parts of C++. That requires humans in the loop to enforce those decisions. Humans are fallible.

If you make it impossible at the language level then there's nothing to train. You just can't do the thing unintentionally.

And they didn't specify Rust; the aerospace industry has been using Ada for decades when it comes to mission critical stuff. Ada's compiler has long had a similar notoriety to rust's regarding the difficulty curve.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

My guess would also be that most enterprises prefer Ada over Rust, because Rust lack standardisation. Sometimes you need to do unsafe things though and your billion dollar rocket explode.