C is fun to me because the syntax is easy to understand and straight to the point. C is also great for learning low level coding, I find Rust so confusing
C is fun to me because the syntax is easy to understand and straight to the point.
You probably had never the pleasure to search for bugs caused by C Undefined Behaviour in multithreaded code.
When I was writing my diploma thesis, I was writing multi-threaded code for an embedded DSP system. Results were wrong all the time. I tracked it down to atan2() giving wrong results. I searched for about six weeks how to fix that and it disappeared when I changed the position of the program’s data segment.
The above debugging experience was 25 years ago. We have better languages now. Rust has no Undefined Behaviour. That means you can track any bug (except compiler bugs) deterministically down to where the actual logic of the code, and the model of it which was in your head depart. This is great.
Rust is fun because you can compile a complex program and it runs.
But industry is still working with a fifty year old language written for systems where 32 kilobytes were a lot of memory. At work, I am still searching for bugs in multi-threaded C code with manual memory management (the previous developer didn’t think this needs locks), and I have to explain to the CTO that no, wo won’t have a release this fall, while the company literally drowns in technical debt.
Also really easy to introduce bugs. But from how everyone online talks about being good developers is all you need. I don’t know how those bugs get there in the first place.
I don’t know how those bugs get there in the first place.
Easy to explain.
Visualizing program code as cables, this is how a shiny new program would look:
And this how, for example in a commercial environment, or if the programmers are not absolute masters, such a program will look after 15 years of bug fixing, feature requests, urgent changes, deadlines, and unfinished restructurings:
The thing is that especially C code contains tons of implicit invariants which you simply cannot maintain in such code.
And don’t forgot that the picture above shows perhaps 500 cables, but a codebase can easily contain 50000 lines of code…
Rust us way easier to understand for me (and I’d guess most people) than C.
Rust is fun because it’s the only mainstream language with an affine type system, which allows some really cool patterns like the typestate pattern. And the fact that there’s no inheritance or null or exceptions is amazing.
The first picture isn’t what people write, even though it’s technically compilable, it’s not what C is.
The second is a normal syntax, pretty simple to understand if you write enough code.
C is very simple language at it’s core, and it allows for it to be used in a very complicated systems.
Rust requires you to unlearn some of the C and CPP habits. And so it’s like learning a language that approaches things differently. That is pretty fun to see how another language solves a problem etc.
I think rust is a very fun and interesting language tbh. But you are free to not like it, that’s all good man. That’s why we have different languages.
After getting into rust, for me, you need to convince me to use C or Cpp, they have their niches for sure, but rust allows that too like embedded programming etc.
This checks out. I tried some Rust coding challenges and couldn’t get my stuff to compile mostly. When I see the solution it seems straightforward but also not intuitive.
What part of Rust is fun?
C is fun to me because the syntax is easy to understand and straight to the point. C is also great for learning low level coding, I find Rust so confusing
You probably had never the pleasure to search for bugs caused by C Undefined Behaviour in multithreaded code.
When I was writing my diploma thesis, I was writing multi-threaded code for an embedded DSP system. Results were wrong all the time. I tracked it down to
atan2()giving wrong results. I searched for about six weeks how to fix that and it disappeared when I changed the position of the program’s data segment.(If the concept of Undefined Behaviour is new to you, I can recommend the web pages of Jens Regehr).
The above debugging experience was 25 years ago. We have better languages now. Rust has no Undefined Behaviour. That means you can track any bug (except compiler bugs) deterministically down to where the actual logic of the code, and the model of it which was in your head depart. This is great.
Rust is fun because you can compile a complex program and it runs.
But industry is still working with a fifty year old language written for systems where 32 kilobytes were a lot of memory. At work, I am still searching for bugs in multi-threaded C code with manual memory management (the previous developer didn’t think this needs locks), and I have to explain to the CTO that no, wo won’t have a release this fall, while the company literally drowns in technical debt.
That is simply not true. See here for a list of behavior that is considered undefined in Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/behavior-considered-undefined.html
However, most (all?) of these require the use of
unsafe, which helps narrow down where the problem might be, if you trigger any of this behaviorYeah that is correct.
I was thinking in Safe Rust alone, and actually forgot about Unsafe Rust.
Because I have so far almost never used Unsafe Rust, except for C library bindings.
Ok fair point. I mainly code in C for making GBA games and random projects, so I haven’t done much multithreaded work
Also really easy to introduce bugs. But from how everyone online talks about being good developers is all you need. I don’t know how those bugs get there in the first place.
Easy to explain.
Visualizing program code as cables, this is how a shiny new program would look:
And this how, for example in a commercial environment, or if the programmers are not absolute masters, such a program will look after 15 years of bug fixing, feature requests, urgent changes, deadlines, and unfinished restructurings:
The thing is that especially C code contains tons of implicit invariants which you simply cannot maintain in such code.
And don’t forgot that the picture above shows perhaps 500 cables, but a codebase can easily contain 50000 lines of code…
Rust us way easier to understand for me (and I’d guess most people) than C.
Rust is fun because it’s the only mainstream language with an affine type system, which allows some really cool patterns like the typestate pattern. And the fact that there’s no inheritance or null or exceptions is amazing.
Yes, C syntax is easy understand
The first picture isn’t what people write, even though it’s technically compilable, it’s not what C is.
The second is a normal syntax, pretty simple to understand if you write enough code.
C is very simple language at it’s core, and it allows for it to be used in a very complicated systems.
Were you trying to post examples of it being easy or do you actually find those hard?
This is why you don’t write C, after a while this looks normal and sane
Rust requires you to unlearn some of the C and CPP habits. And so it’s like learning a language that approaches things differently. That is pretty fun to see how another language solves a problem etc. I think rust is a very fun and interesting language tbh. But you are free to not like it, that’s all good man. That’s why we have different languages. After getting into rust, for me, you need to convince me to use C or Cpp, they have their niches for sure, but rust allows that too like embedded programming etc.
This checks out. I tried some Rust coding challenges and couldn’t get my stuff to compile mostly. When I see the solution it seems straightforward but also not intuitive.