A lot of good stuff in there

Posted Feb 15, 2025 16:28 UTC (Sat) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118)
In reply to: A lot of good stuff in there by wtarreau
Parent article: New leadership for Asahi Linux

> I spent two hours extending a hello world program to append a numerical argument passed on the command line, i.e. the equivalent of printf("hello world: %d\n", argc>1?atoi(argv[1]:0). I just gave up, being constantly told by the compiler that I was doing bad stuff. It did encourage me to try different things, which is great, but each thing I tried didn't work and at some point I was going in loops. It's quite discouraging, because I spend my time telling gcc to shut up when it doesn't know, and here I felt that the compiler was thousands of times more rigid and extremist.

Yes, that is expected. You need to learn the language, which does not end at learning the syntax. This means aligning your mental model with the language, learning some new habits, and unlearning some of the old ones.

There would be no point in Rust if it was just a clone of C with a more inscrutable syntax. Rust is valuable *precisely* because it represents more than just C with an inscrutable syntax.

> I can hardly see a use case where this could bring me anything except pain.

This does not mean such a use case does not exist. This is precisely the "hubris trap" that so many high-profile Linux developers and maintainers are falling into.