About type inference coming to the C language as well

Posted Dec 12, 2023 11:34 UTC (Tue) by mb (subscriber, #50428)
In reply to: About type inference coming to the C language as well by swilmet
Parent article: Modern C for Fedora (and the world)

>But I had the idea to convert (a subset of) C to _safe_ Rust, of course.

That is not possible, except for very trivial cases.

The C code does neither include enough information (e.g. lifetimes) for that to work, nor is it usually structured in a way for this to work.

Programming in Rust requires a different way of thinking and a different way of structuring your code. An automatic translation of the usual ideomatic C programs will fail so hard that it would be easier to rewrite it from scratch instead of translating it and then fixing the compile failures.

About type inference coming to the C language as well

Posted Dec 13, 2023 23:59 UTC (Wed) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link] (2 responses)

The C syntax alone is not enough, but comments with annotations can be added, and become part of the language.

I started to learn Rust but dislike the fact that it has many core features ("high-level ergonomics"). It's probably possible to use Rust in a simplistic way though, except maybe if a library forces to use the fancy features.

About type inference coming to the C language as well

Posted Dec 14, 2023 9:37 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

You could avoid using those libraries, and limit yourself to libraries that have a "simple" enough interface for you (no_std libraries are a good thing to look for here, since they're designed with just core and maybe alloc in mind, not the whole of std) - bearing in mind that you don't need to care how those libraries are implemented if it's just about personal preference.

In general, though, I wouldn't be scared of a complex core language - all of that complexity has to be handled somewhere, and a complex core language can mean that complexity is being compiler-checked instead of human-checked.

About type inference coming to the C language as well

Posted Dec 14, 2023 11:07 UTC (Thu) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link]

The codebases that I maintain already use between two and three/four main programming languages (welcome to GNOME, I should say). At some point I wanted to write new code in Rust, but it means adding more complexity and being less productive for some time while learning the language.

"Soft"ware, they said :-)