Slashdot Mirror
Criticizing the Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die
An anonymous reader sends an article taking a harsh look at Rust, the language created by Mozilla Research, and arguing that despite all the flaws of C and C++, the two older languages are likely to remain in heavy use for a long time to come. Here are a few of the arguments: "[W]hat actually makes Rust safe, by the way? To put it simple, this is a language with a built-in code analyzer and it's a pretty tough one: it can catch all the bugs typical of C++ and dealing not only with memory management, but multithreading as well. Pass a reference to an assignable object through a pipe to another thread and then try to use this reference yourself - the program just will refuse to compile. And that's really cool. But C++ too hasn't stood still during the last 30 years, and plenty of both static and dynamic analyzers supporting it have been released during this time."
Further, "Like many of new languages, Rust is walking the path of simplification. I can generally understand why it doesn't have a decent inheritance and exceptions, but the fact itself that someone is making decisions for me regarding things like that makes me feel somewhat displeased. C++ doesn't restrict programmers regarding what they can or cannot use." And finally, "I can't but remind you for one more time that the source of troubles is usually in humans, not technology . If your C++ code is not good enough or Java code is painfully slow, it's not because the technology is bad - it's because you haven't learned how to use it right. That way, you won't be satisfied with Rust either, but just for some other reasons."
Further, "Like many of new languages, Rust is walking the path of simplification. I can generally understand why it doesn't have a decent inheritance and exceptions, but the fact itself that someone is making decisions for me regarding things like that makes me feel somewhat displeased. C++ doesn't restrict programmers regarding what they can or cannot use." And finally, "I can't but remind you for one more time that the source of troubles is usually in humans, not technology . If your C++ code is not good enough or Java code is painfully slow, it's not because the technology is bad - it's because you haven't learned how to use it right. That way, you won't be satisfied with Rust either, but just for some other reasons."
No, I'm pretty sure the heat death of the universe will kill those languages
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
A programming language is better if it does one thing: Solves a particular type of general problem more efficiently and clearly than the language of comparison. The larger this set and scope of general problems, the better the language; the fewer corner cases hinder the language, the better the language.
You will find the integration of mathematical languages, physics languages, or graphics languages into a general programming language a pile of clutter and complication. They won't integrate with much of the language, or they'll complicate it, or they'll constrict it. This is why you have libraries in a language to do some general tasks (Box2d, PhysX APIs, etc.), low-level specialized assemblies (OpenGL CUDA, shader assembly), and specialized high-level languages (R, Matlab): these tasks are best integrated by interfacing with a black box that takes in a data set, runs it through a set of coded procedures, and spits out a result.
What makes a programming language "better" than state-of-the-art is its ability to supply general programming practices and functionality in an efficient way for humans. Classes that can be easily swiveled or overloaded or extended or polymorphed, but only in a way that a human being can reliably understand--that is, that a human being who has studied the language won't still struggle with understanding the workings of the language due to its conflict with the method of human thought. Code bodies which are simultaneously readable, maintainable, and efficiently executable. The ability to represent a wide variety of specialized tasks as API classes and functions, even if less effective than a specialized language, should someone seek to integrate physics or mathematics or cryptography or other such things with their program. All of these things, reflected in a way a human can grasp and use with fewer human-introduced defects, and also in a way that does not constrict the human from approaching the subset of programming tasks carried out in nearly 100% of code (imagine if 1 in 100 functions needed a specialized language, not a simple library API or raw programming code; even the Linux kernel is far less than 1% low-level assembly).
It is not valid to say that people are bad at programming in C++ because they are bad programmers; but it is valid to say that bad programmers will not become good programmers if given a good language. If we assume, for example, that Perl is terrible and Python is some form of holy perfection, then we can claim that Perl will cause a good, studied, skilled Perl programmer to make many more defects than a good, studied, skilled Python programmer will make in Python; indeed, our metric for whether Perl or Python is superior to one another would be both the speed at which a new inductee to the language can learn to code with similar defects--how much programming exposure over a variety of challenging tasks does a person need in order to use the language for tasks of similar complexity without creating defects? Swift, Rust, C#, and so forth will face the same challenges: what is the defect rate produced by the programmer, relative to the amount of effort and resulting skill of the programmer in the given language, and how does it compare to all other languages?
Bad languages will make good programmers produce more bad code. Good languages will not make bad programmers produce good code; they will enable good programmers to produce less bad code.
Support my political activism on Patreon.