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Ask Slashdot: Is it Practical To Replace C With Rust?

Posted by timothy on from the a-b-rust-d-yep-works-fine dept.

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?

5 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. You know the old saying... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No one ever got fired for using C.

    1. Re:You know the old saying... by shaitand · · Score: 5, Insightful

      C has it's ups and downs but sucking isn't one of its properties.

    2. Re:You know the old saying... by DutchUncle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No one ever got fired for using C.

      That phrase has also been used for heyday IBM and Microsoft. But both sucked.

      Heydey IBM didn't suck. You whippersnappers just don't appreciate what we had to do on mainframes to lay the groundwork for distributed computing. A lot of the ultra-modern pipelining in processors can be traced directly to Cray and Amdahl and other designers from the golden age, and if they could have had as much spare hardware and memory as a modern system-on-chip without blowing up both a bank and the power grid, who knows how much further we'd already be.

  2. Community Support by freak0fnature · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Where I am they chose SpineJS a few years ago, looked like a great language, easy, etc. After a few years, one thing we noticed was the lack of online help when you run into issues. It's just not that widely used. Rust is ranked 49th on Tiobe. Maybe it will be the next best thing, but if it isn't, you'll be stuck with something that has little community support.

  3. It's not the language itself... by DrTJ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... that determines its success or not in a non-nieche segment.

    It's the mass of developers that already know it, it's the accumulated code base (both locally and globally) and most importantly: the eco system of tools surrounding it: the compilers, the IDEs, the debuggers, the static/dynamic code analysis, build systems, code generators, mock tools, coverage tools etc.

    The new kids on the block have a lot of catching up to do in areas which are not directly language related.