Great!

Posted May 23, 2015 16:04 UTC (Sat) by ncm (guest, #165)
In reply to: Great! by ofranja
Parent article: Rust 1.0 released

Ideological purity is very appealing up to the point that it begins to actively interfere with sound system engineering principles. At that point, its main effect is to restrict use of the language to toy applications and academia. Toys are fun, but we have an overabundance of toy languages already. It would be tragic if a language with as much promise as Rust retreated to toyland.

An alternative would be to fork the language, and let Rustoy go the way of so many before it, while those of us who have serious engineering goals get on with them. That would be unfortunate but not tragic.

Great!

Posted May 23, 2015 16:50 UTC (Sat) by ofranja (guest, #11084) [Link]

Sound system engineering principles are a form of ideological purity.

I'd rather view this as a design decision instead of just ideological purity - afterall, if you are trying to design a safe systems language, you have to limit the unsafeness to strictly necessary points. If you are trying to argue that safeness and soundness are not important, Rust might not be a proper fit for your needs.

I guess Rust is not trying to be the glorious successor of C++ or a new C++ with aesthetic improvements - as others like D did - but it's trying to be something different. And this might be the key point of its success.