Re: The Case for Rust (in the base system)

Second!



On 1/21/24 02:51, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> --------
> Ihor Antonov writes:
>
>> As much as I love the idea of Rust, I don't think it is going to solve
>> our problems.
> The tools are /never/ the real problem.
>
> I will readily agree that the ISO-C people have done more to hurt
> the C language, and less to improve it, than anybody else, and that
> we need to deal with their continued refusal to come into the 1990'ies.
>
> But after I read this entire thread, the "pro" argument for Rust
> seems boil down to just "all the cool kids do it".
>
> That exact same argument was used for "Perl in base" and "Java in
> base" previously, and if we hadn't dodged those bullets, we wouldn't
> be here today.
>
> The sprawling and loosely connected ports collection has several
> strata of "all the cool kids do it" languages, and it seems to be
> a much better "organism" for dealing with their eventual obsolescence,
> than our tightly integrated src collection.
>
> I will also "second" the comment about C++ getting to be a really
> good language, in particular if you play it like a violin:
>
> 	Just because you /paid/ for the entire bow, doesn't mean you
> 	have to /play/ the entire bow.
>
> So rather than jump onto this or some other hypewagon-of-the-year,
> only to regret it some years later and having to repay the technical
> debt with interest to get it out of the tree again, I propose that
> we quietly and gradually look more and more to C++ for our "advanced
> needs".
>
> I also propose, that next time somebody advocates for importing
> some "all the cool kids are doing it language" or other, we refuse
> to even look at their proposal, until they have proven their skill
> in, and dedication to, the language, by faithfully reimplementing
> cvsup in it, and documented how and why it is a better language for
> that, than Modula-3 was.
>
> Poul-Henning
>