White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe - eviltoast

On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).

On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?

  • tiredofsametab@kbin.run
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    8 months ago

    Software engineer for almost two decades at this point, programming off and on since a kid in the late '80s: Rust is harder. It did seem to get better between versions and maybe it’s easier now, but definitely harder than a lot of what I’ve worked in (which ranges Perl, PHP, C, C++, C#, Java, Groovy/Grails, Rust, js, typescript, various flavors of BASIC, and Go (and probably more I’m forgetting now but didn’t work with much; I’m excluding bash/batch, DB stored procedures (though I worked on a billing system written almost entirely in them), etc.)

    That said, I don’t think it’s a bad thing and of course working in something makes you faster at it, but I do think it’s harder, especially when first learning about (and fighting with) the borrow checker, dealing with lifetimes, etc.

    The availability of libraries, frameworks, tools, and documentation can also have a big impact on how long it takes to make something.