eh, i really did look for a joke. all i see is a “well actually” opinion that somebody here probably holds

Yes if you remove all frivolity I’m sure the joke will be funnier

I definitely agree on the last point. Personally I like languages where I can get the compiler to check a lot more of my reasoning, but I still want to be able to use all the memory management techniques that people use in C.

I remember Jonathan Blow did a fairly rambling stream of consciousness talk on his criticisms of Rust, and it was largely written off as “old man yells at clouds”, but I tried to make sense of what he was saying and eventually realised he had a lot of good points.

I think it was this one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk

That’s what std::move does, and you’re right that it’s quite an ugly hack to deal with C++ legacy mistakes that C doesn’t have.

I say move semantics to refer to the broader concept, which exists to make manual memory management safer and easier to get right. It’s also a core feature of Rust.

Also I’m talking about parametric polymorphism, not subtype polymorphism. So I mean things like lists, queues and maps which can be specialised for the element type. That’s what I can’t imagine living without.

I would have said the same thing a few years ago, but after writing C++ professionally for a while I have to grudgingly admit that most of the new features are very useful for writing simpler code.

A few are still infuriating though, and I still consider the language an abomination. It has too many awful legacy problems that can never be fixed.

The only conceivable way to avoid pointers in C is by using indices into arrays, which have the exact same set of problems that pointers do because array indexing and pointer dereferencing are the same thing. If anything array indexing is slightly worse, because the index doesn’t carry a type.

Also you’re ignoring a whole host of other problems in C. Most notably unions.

People say that “you only need to learn pointers”, but that’s not a real thing you can do. It’s like saying it’s easy to write correct brainfuck because the language spec is so small. The exact opposite is true.

I’m not a fan of C++, but move semantics seem very clearly like a solution to a problem that C invented.

Though to be honest I could live with manual memory management. What I really don’t understand is how anyone can bear to use C after rewriting the same monomorphic collection type for the 20th time.

I don’t want to be mean, but this is quite a lot of misinformation. For the benefit of other readers: this post makes a large number of specific claims very confidently, and almost all of them are wrong.

It takes time to make sense of this subject and it’s normal to get things wrong while learning. I just don’t want other people to go away thinking that closures have something to do with memory safety, etc.

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I greatly fear refactoring in Rust. Making a single conceptual change can require a huge number of code changes in practice, especially if it’s a change to ownership.

Refactoring in languages like Java and C# is effortless in comparison, and not error prone at all in a modern codebase.

You can use RC and clone everywhere, but now your code is unreadable, slow, and might even have memory leaks.

You can use slotmaps everywhere, but now you’re embedding a different memory model with verbose syntax that doesn’t even have first-class references.

I don’t even dislike Rust; I recently chose it for another project. I just think it has clear weaknesses and this is one of them.

Wait until this guy finds out that Elon doesn’t actually build the cars

What a whirlwind!

Also, Rust is perhaps, the shittiest, slowest compiled language out there. Even TCC has a leg up on it.

TCC is written exclusively to compile quickly, not to do any real optimisation. There is no conceivable situation in which TCC output will outperform equivalent Rust code.

If you really like how Rust handles its syntax, use a real functional language like OCaml

Rust takes inspiration from OCaml in almost every area except syntax. Close to zero syntax similarly.

In fact, SML compilers like MLton are sometimes faster than Rust.

Lmao, this is a classic line from ~2009 message boards, but with “C++” swapped out for Rust.

Almost every single thing you said is wrong, but in a way too precise to be attributed to random noise. Like scoring zero in a multiple choice exam. I don’t know if you are some kind of performance art troll, but please continue. I’m an instant fan of your work.

Is it really fair to say retain doesn’t compose as well just because it requires reference-based update instead of move-based? I also think using move semantics for in-place updates makes it harder to optimise things like a single field being updated on a large struct.

It also seems harsh to say iterators aren’t a zero-cost abstraction if they miss an optimisation that falls outside what the API promises. It’s natural to expect collect to allocate, no?

But I’m only writing this because I wonder if I haven’t understood your point fully.

(Side note: I think you could implement the API you want on top of retain_mut by using std::mem::replace with a default value, but you’d be hoping that the compiler optimises away all the replace calls when it inlines and sees the code can’t panic. Idk if that would actually work.)

The specifics of C’s design could barely be less important. In the 70s it was one of countless ALGOL derivatives churned out on-demand to support R&D projects like Unix.

Unix succeeded, but it could have been written in any of these languages. The C design process was governed by the difficulty of compiler implementation; everyone was copying ALGOL 68 but some of the features took too long to implement. If Dennis Ritchie had an extra free weekend in 1972, C might have a module system. But he didn’t, so it doesn’t.

A bit tangential, but if the US government really commits to pushing big tech firms to migrate to memory safe languages, where would that leave Zig?

It seems completely implausible to rewrite all the deployed C and C++ in the world any time soon. Even so, the uncertainty created by a top-down push might be enough to stall adoption of an unsafe language.

I just wondered if anyone knows whether that story has affected the plans of the Zig maintainers at all. Or whether there has been any spike in Rust job postings?

I swear, Zoomers are like the steve buscemi “fellow kids” meme, but somehow everyone in the scene is young

Anyway, nice compiler. Might feel basic to you, but writing a back end for a low level IR format is not that much harder.

Haskell has very famously not solved this problem. As in, pretty much every academic paper published on the subject in the past 15 years includes a brief paragraph explaining why Haskell’s effect monads are terrible.

Also, it would be surprising for Rust’s developers to be scared of monads when Rust already has monads as a core language feature, with special syntax support and everything.

I wonder what the planned scope is. C++ is such a fundamentally uncooperative language.

Also somewhere in the middle:

“There’s been no report of this for a while so we’re marking it resolved.”

I appreciate your perspective, thanks for taking the time to share it!

I also agree with most of your points in favour of Rust. It is clearly the biggest programming language design breakthrough in decades.