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Ask Slashdot: Is it Practical To Replace C With Rust?
interval1066 writes: I've heard of rust from various sources around the net for a few years and never paid it much mind, there are so many new languages out now since my early days doing C programming, which what I've stuck to and made me my career. Now I'm heading a project that uses a RoR application to control a large series of sensors and controls in a manufacturing process. Naturally I want to talk to the hardware using a GEM extension written in C, as I've done before.
But another engineer who is not a fan of C (seems few younger engineers are) said he could write the extensions needed easily in Rust. Seems like this is a thing. I took a closer look at rust and it looks to me like another attempt at "C" without pointers, except rust does have a kind of pointer, it appears. I like its ranking on a list of fastest languages, and it seems pretty simple with an initial tool footprint that is quite small.
But what are the trade offs? Another language, and one that few engineers know (much like Vala, which I like very much but has the same small user base). What if I need another engineer to work on the code? I pretty much know what I can expect from C/C++, rust is a huge unknown, what if I run onto a roadblock? The engineer pushing for rust is emphatic, should I bulldoze him or take the plunge?
But another engineer who is not a fan of C (seems few younger engineers are) said he could write the extensions needed easily in Rust. Seems like this is a thing. I took a closer look at rust and it looks to me like another attempt at "C" without pointers, except rust does have a kind of pointer, it appears. I like its ranking on a list of fastest languages, and it seems pretty simple with an initial tool footprint that is quite small.
But what are the trade offs? Another language, and one that few engineers know (much like Vala, which I like very much but has the same small user base). What if I need another engineer to work on the code? I pretty much know what I can expect from C/C++, rust is a huge unknown, what if I run onto a roadblock? The engineer pushing for rust is emphatic, should I bulldoze him or take the plunge?
You should definitely investigate rust. It's very well designed. It has great support to call into C code and C libraries. It compiles fast. The standard library is much more convenient than C/C++. You have complete memory safety by default, without garbage collection. It has great support for safe multithreading. Over time, your speed will increase because you won't be spending weeks tracking a heisenbug due to memory corruption. There is some learning overhead, but it's worth it.
The biggest issue is that you won't have as big of an ecosystem around rust. You won't find good support for all of the libraries that you might want to use. But those problems aren't insurmountable.
What you say was true of early releases of Rust. But they removed all traces of any kind of runtime for exactly this reason. It was a breaking change but it happened quite a long time before the 1.0 release. Here's the documentation for the change: https://github.com/rust-lang/r...
Here's a blog entry on using Rust for embedded. It dates from February and uses 1.0-alpha but of course 1.0 is out now:
http://spin.atomicobject.com/2...
In these days of LLVM, the portability story is good, even relative to C. No C portability gotchas.