Oh, and there might be better ways of modelling the essential complexity in systems programming - see 's Kitten language for instance. But I digress. This also shows why I am bad at marketing.
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If I was running a company and choosing a language I'd rather go with C# or F# + C than Rust. 🤷♂️
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Part of the reason I'd go with C# or F# is because it *can* interface with C code better than many languages. You need libraries, C has all the libraries, and if you're using C libraries you'll inevitably sometimes need to write C code.
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F# is a fine language too, if you need to run .NET. It helps to know C, but I definitely would not want to be writing any more of it in 2018, unless in a legacy code base or if the platform is out of reach of LLVM. Rust has a great C FFI, and can be embedded in other runtimes.
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If you use C libraries and never need to edit them somehow....consider yourself lucky, I guess.
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That’s what I’d class as ‘legacy’.
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New libraries in Rust with a C ffi. Gradual migration after that.
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As an individual decision, that's fine.
For a company, I think that would be a strategic mistake.
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It does very much depend on your context. For us we don’t want to deal with the cost of memory safety bugs and security vulnerabilities.
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For smaller embedded programs that are mainly stack allocated, fine, but we’re dealing with large, concurrent software with hard to track lifetimes. Rust brings lots of sanity to that.
I’m at , also working on font shaping and browser engines though. We’re small, and don’t have time and money to burn on memory safety/security issues. Currently transitioning our legacy C code to Rust. The rest is in Mercury.