Rust [LWN.net]

Rust

Posted Apr 4, 2013 20:42 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Rust by Cyberax
Parent article: Mozilla and Samsung building a new browser engine

Java succeeded on mobile (Android) and on the server-side.

Java is used to write huge amount of new code, that's true, but the same can be said about PHP or JavaScript and number of projects which switched from C to Java is so minuscule it's not even worth talking about. Android only caught up when it allowed execution of C/C++ code and can only be counted as yet-another-failed-attempt-to-replace-C++-with-Java (or may be it was never planned as such an attempt: some people claim that NDK for Android was planned from the start and was just released later because it was not ready for Android 1.0).

C# is very successful on Windows both on client and server side.

Again, in the same fashion: some pieces are written in C# but amount of new C++ code does not go down at all and people rarely make conscious decision to switch from C++ to C# (few projects did that - notably Visual Studio itself - but these are rare exceptions, not rule). If anything C# replaced Visual Basic not C++ - and that only happened because Visual Basic was brutally killed (Visual Fred is not Visual Basic).

P.S. Note that I don't argue that Java and/or C# are not popular - of course they are (I don't necessarily think it's good thing, but that's irrelevant), but are they popular as "Glorious Successor to C" or "Glorious Successor to C++"? Of course not! Not even close!

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Rust

Posted Apr 4, 2013 21:39 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

>Java is used to write huge amount of new code, that's true, but the same can be said about PHP or JavaScript and number of projects which switched from C to Java is so minuscule it's not even worth talking about.
Heh. You clearly haven't seen the number of large enterprise projects switching from C++ to Java in 90s and early 2000-s. Ditto for C# - quite a lot of software was rewritten in it.

A good C++-like language does not NEED to be directly compatible with all braindeadness of C, it just needs to have a good FFI.

>Again, in the same fashion: some pieces are written in C# but amount of new C++ code does not go down at all and people rarely make conscious decision to switch from C++ to C#
And I've seen tons of these switches. People were eager to jump C++ when an acceptable alternative presented itself.

Rust

Posted Apr 5, 2013 7:38 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

You clearly haven't seen the number of large enterprise projects switching from C++ to Java in 90s and early 2000-s.

Yes, I have seen these failures. What about them? Sure, with well-oiled PR machine you can convince pointy-haired bosses to adopt basically anything and because they can not admit that they goofed up failures are often presented as successes (Elop is undisputed leader here, but he's not the only one). In any case they are mostly about hype: systems written in Cobol, Pascal, dBase and other similar languages are often still used even when bosses think they operate pure Java (or C#) shops.

IOW: if anything "the big switch of enterprise to Java and C#" is nothing but smoke and mirrors. PR achievement at best.

Rust

Posted Apr 4, 2013 23:11 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

(Visual Fred is not Visual Basic)

I see esr still doesn't understand The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets. sigh.