[mkroot] Rust

[Rob Landley]

On 05/19/2017 02:06 PM, Philip Rhoades wrote:
> Rob,
> 
> Have you had a look at Rust?:
> 
>   https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/05/13/rustup.html
> 
> I got interested in it because of my (great) interest in the SAFE network.
> 
> Phil.

Yes I have. (I met @edunham at LCA and follow her on twitter.) And I've
looked at swift, and go, and a half-dozen other attempts at replacing C
over the years. (I was in the debug team for IBM's port of JavaOS to
PowerPC in 1997. I suspect lua would have become huge if it had shipped
posix bindings by default, but it didn't so it's a niche.)

I like C. C is a good language for what it does. Chefs play with knives
and fire, you can microwave a boxed dinner because a chef prepared it
for you. There's a _reason_ the python, perl, and php interpreters were
all written in C.

The big problem C had is the C++ people's marketing strategy was "we
include the whole of C, and are thus just as good a language as C, the
same way a mud pie contains an entire glass of water and is thus just as
good a beverage, QED".

C is a simple language. The programs you write with it aren't, but the
language itself is 30-ish keywords, some algebra, function call syntax,
and a standard library.

The C++ guys have been livid that the portable assembly language they
hijacked remains as popular as their offshoot, so they took over
compiler development and have tried to turn it into the same minefield
of special case behavior (everything is "undefined") that C++ is, when
all of those undefined behaviors boil down to "if you do the obvious
thing the optimizer makes a mistake and disabling the broken optimizer
isn't considered a reasonable solution because C++".

I may have strong feelings about this. :)

I lump them all in with lua and ruby as things certain programs are
written in. Rust's ties to mozilla are a huge downside for it. They've
been trying to wean themselves off of that, but _without_ a sponsor
(like Google for Go or Apple for Swift) they're sort of a less
interesting lua.

Rob