To what end? You’ve already stated elsewhere that your only point is that you can, under an increasingly strict set of conditions, write code that is (almost always) free of memory bugs. Great!
Nobody is hiding around the corner waiting to take `gcc` or `clang` away from you if you want to keep using them. Nobody's threatening to take away your software engineering license if we catch you writing a memory bug.
This whole thread is ridiculous. “The safety improvements in modern cars are substantial. If you're buying a new car these days, you should probably buy one made after 2018.” “Well I'm still driving my 1969 Malibu. Plus I’ve never been in an accident so I don’t need those safety features.” “Okay but… what are those dents in your car?” “I said no accidents on public roads. Prove me wrong or STFU.”
I'm sorry, but this is an entirely imagined persecution. Nobody is taking your C compiler away from you. Nobody thinks you're a bad person for using C. Nobody thinks you're a bad programmer for using C.
Many of us think there are better alternatives. We're excited about these better alternatives. We want people to use these better alternatives. We think these better alternative solve a lot of problems that many people spend a lot of time dealing with. We think these better alternatives prevent many of the types of bugs that regularly ruin people's afternoons, evenings, and weekends. We really think you should try it out, but if you don't like it, literally nobody is coming to take your compiler away from you.
We do think a lot of the common arguments against moving to these languages are bullshit though. "Rust can't do self-referential data structures" is one of them. "I have a ton of expertise in C and it would take more time than I'm willing to spend to get to that level in something else", "this project is already written in C and mature", and "I write code for unsupported platforms" aren't bullshit, but they are ones that naturally decay in how compelling they are over time.
And as much as I believe you personally can write memory-safe programs in C, I would be willing to bet this guarantee would go out the window the moment you add a second maintainer who can push and release code without you vetting every commit.
> I'm sorry, but this is an entirely imagined persecution. Nobody is taking your C compiler away from you. Nobody thinks you're a bad person for using C. Nobody thinks you're a bad programmer for using C.
I've had people say all of these things to me in various ways.
"You should be ashamed of yourself," is a typical phrase used.
> Many of us think there are better alternatives. We're excited about these better alternatives. We want people to use these better alternatives. We think these better alternative solve a lot of problems that many people spend a lot of time dealing with. We think these better alternatives prevent many of the types of bugs that regularly ruin people's afternoons, evenings, and weekends.
This excitement has been over-the-top and as mentioned by one or more people in this thread, it has actually driven people away from Rust. As much as I don't like Rust, I don't want that to happen.
> We really think you should try it out, but if you don't like it, literally nobody is coming to take your compiler away from you.
When people say they want to deprecate C, that's what they mean. If you deprecate C, the compilers will be abandoned, which in the software world converges to the same effect as taking it away because compilers need ongoing maintenance to keep up with new platforms and such.
If a new platform becomes mainstream, and there's no C compiler for it, then my C compiler has effectively been taken away.
This is one reason I'm making my C replacement language: I do think that C will eventually be abandoned on the major platforms, and I want to have switched by that time.
> We do think a lot of the common arguments against moving to these languages are bull** though.
Which is fair. You didn't say all of them are, and yes, a lot of the common arguments are crud.
> "Rust can't do self-referential data structures" is one of them.
I actually agree with you; this is a crud argument. In order to make my C as safe as possible, I don't use self-referential data structures either; I use a parent data structure.
I did this with linked lists [1]. The linked list is a parent data structure that owns everything, and the items in the linked list just have indices to their neighbors. This allows me to tie Rust-like lifetimes to the items.
And any self-referential data structure can be expressed in terms of a parent data structure and children data structures.
So yes, you are right: this argument is crud.
> "I have a ton of expertise in C and it would take more time than I'm willing to spend to get to that level in something else", "this project is already written in C and mature", and "I write code for unsupported platforms" aren't bull**, but they are ones that naturally decay in how compelling they are over time.
I agree. This is another reason I'm still writing a C replacement for myself.
> And as much as I believe you personally can write memory-safe programs in C, I would be willing to bet this guarantee would go out the window the moment you add a second maintainer who can push and release code without you vetting every commit.
Yep. I agree. Even if it's Linus Torvalds, Ken Thompson, or anyone.
I still vet every commit, or just not accept anything.
It also helps me keep the scope manageable: if I can't do it myself, the scope is too large.
> "You should be ashamed of yourself," is a typical phrase used.
I'm trying very hard to not "no true scotsman" myself here. But I tend to think of it like this: there's people, and then there's Twitter personas. There's a lot of very strong, absurd opinions that Twitter personas have but that I don't ever seem to encounter in the real world.
Maybe another way of putting it is that if I dropped you on stage in the middle of a RustConf keynote, nobody would actually have these types of opinions. And if anyone did express such a thing, there would be overwhelming opposition to it. But of course I can't prove this, and I'd be willing to admit I'm wrong. And none of this discounts the fact that you've apparently seen these types of opinions firsthand.
> > We really think you should try it out, but if you don't like it, literally nobody is coming to take your compiler away from you.
> When people say they want to deprecate C, that's what they mean.
I don't think that's a reasonable take at all. I'd be willing to bet that what Mark Russinovich was saying was exactly what you just stated in another thread: "I agree with this. I never said people should use C by default; absolutely not. They should use Rust by default."
> If a new platform becomes mainstream, and there's no C compiler for it, then my C compiler has effectively been taken away.
Being taken away is very, very different from other people not being sufficiently motivated to build something you want to exist. Nobody has "taken away" COBOL from folks by not porting compilers to arm64 (I have no idea if arm64 COBOL compilers exist, feel free to substitute a suitable arch/lang).
> This is one reason I'm making my C replacement language: I do think that C will eventually be abandoned on the major platforms, and I want to have switched by that time.
I'd be willing to bet substantial sums of money that "eventually" will not include either of our lifetimes. And my guess is it would be far less work to port C to (or write an LLVM backend for) x86-128 or aarch256 or RISC IX than to maintain your own language and keep it running on all the major platforms. But good luck to you nonetheless.
> Yep. I agree. Even if it's Linus Torvalds, Ken Thompson, or anyone.
I'm pleased you pointed this out! I'd debated saying this but opted not to, it's great that we agree on that extra detail.
> I'm trying very hard to not "no true scotsman" myself here. But I tend to think of it like this: there's people, and then there's Twitter personas. There's a lot of very strong, absurd opinions that Twitter personas have but that I don't ever seem to encounter in the real world.
If we expand that to Reddit and Hacker News, I have to agree, so it might have just been personas I went up against.
> Maybe another way of putting it is that if I dropped you on stage in the middle of a RustConf keynote, nobody would actually have these types of opinions. And if anyone did express such a thing, there would be overwhelming opposition to it. But of course I can't prove this, and I'd be willing to admit I'm wrong.
But I've never been to RustConf, so I can't dispute this. I'll simply have to trust you on this one.
Though dropping me of all people into a RustConf keynote would be a wild prank. Hilarious.
> And none of this discounts the fact that you've apparently seen these types of opinions firsthand.
Unless I've only seen personas, as you suspect, and I can't refute that.
> I don't think that's a reasonable take at all. I'd be willing to bet that what Mark Russinovich was saying was exactly what you just stated in another thread: "I agree with this. I never said people should use C by default; absolutely not. They should use Rust by default."
I'm not so sure because I used to be one of the people that thought C should die, as in, have everything rewritten into another language. People like that do exist.
But again, they may just be personas. Whoops.
> Being taken away is very, very different from other people not being sufficiently motivated to build something you want to exist. Nobody has "taken away" COBOL from folks by not porting compilers to arm64 (I have no idea if arm64 COBOL compilers exist, feel free to substitute a suitable arch/lang).
This is a fair counterargument. I guess I should correct myself by saying that it would feel like my C compiler would be taken away.
> I'd be willing to bet substantial sums of money that "eventually" will not include either of our lifetimes.
I'm not so sure, but no one can predict the future. :) I wouldn't have thought Rust would end up in the Linux kernel when I first heard of it. Now it's all but certain to happen.
> And my guess is it would be far less work to port C to (or write an LLVM backend for) x86-128 or aarch256 or RISC IX than to maintain your own language and keep it running on all the major platforms. But good luck to you nonetheless.
That's true. It's why my language will bootstrap itself to C99! For every platform that is too much work to support directly, I'll support it by having a C99 compiler for that platform.
C99 should not need much maintenance. I hope. Or someone else will care enough to do it. I hope.
> I'm pleased you pointed this out! I'd debated saying this but opted not to, it's great that we agree on that extra detail.
Good! And you're welcome.
Yeah, I'm picky. I've rewritten code given to me by a FreeBSD kernel developer who is twice my age and much better than me.
> If we expand that to Reddit and Hacker News, I have to agree, so it might have just been personas I went up against.
"Twitter personas" is just my pet name for the phenomenon because it seems strongest (or maybe I just first noticed it) there.
> But I've never been to RustConf, so I can't dispute this. I'll simply have to trust you on this one.
Hah! I've never actually been either. I just meant this as a standin for putting you in front of actual, real, physical people who also are likely closer to the evangelist end of the spectrum.
Lest you lump me in with the RESF, I just want to make it clear that all I did was point out your overconfidence in your C abilities. I don't care what language you use or anyone uses. I think Rust has lots of problems that it's stuck with, and I've said on multiple other occasions that the ideal language would be a mix of Rust (borrow checker, typesystem) and Zig (comptime, generics, explicit allocation).
Nobody is hiding around the corner waiting to take `gcc` or `clang` away from you if you want to keep using them. Nobody's threatening to take away your software engineering license if we catch you writing a memory bug.
This whole thread is ridiculous. “The safety improvements in modern cars are substantial. If you're buying a new car these days, you should probably buy one made after 2018.” “Well I'm still driving my 1969 Malibu. Plus I’ve never been in an accident so I don’t need those safety features.” “Okay but… what are those dents in your car?” “I said no accidents on public roads. Prove me wrong or STFU.”