Java/C# vs Rust
Java/C# vs Rust
Posted Aug 18, 2024 14:55 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Java/C# vs Rust by pizza
Parent article: Standards for use of unsafe Rust in the kernel
> ...So billions of lines of inherently memory-safe code deployed onto commodity systems never happened?
Of course they happened! Billions of lines of code already written is various memory-safe language (from COBOL and Clarion to Visual Basic and FoxPro) were, with great pains, rewritten in two other, more resource hungry memory safe languages.
Yes, these languages never have been using “managed code” or “tracing garbage collection”, but they were perfectly memory safe and they worked perfectly fine.
No matter how you look on it the whole thing it looks like a net negative to me: we haven't gotten any tangible benefits from that rewrite (although some industries have gotten rich, that's true, but that's like burning the house to heat a stew), code that was before than “grand revolution” written in memory safe languages was still written in memory safe languages (only now with lots of more unneeded complexity) and code written in non-memory safe languages continued to use non-memory safe languages.
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