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Eric S Raymond, author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", blogs via Ibiblio
I wanted to like Rust. I really did. I've been investigating it for months, from the outside, as a C replacement with stronger correctness guarantees that we could use for NTPsec [a hardened implementation of Network Time Protocol].
[...] I was evaluating it in contrast with Go, which I learned in order to evaluate as a C replacement a couple of weeks back.
[...] In practice, I found Rust painful to the point of unusability. The learning curve was far worse than I expected; it took me those four days of struggling with inadequate documentation to write 67 lines of wrapper code for [a simple IRC] server.
Even things that should be dirt-simple, like string concatenation, are unreasonably difficult. The language demands a huge amount of fussy, obscure ritual before you can get anything done.
The contrast with Go is extreme. By four days in of exploring Go, I had mastered most of the language, had a working program and tests, and was adding features to taste.
Have you tried using Rust, Go or any other language that might replace C in the future? What are your experiences?
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday January 17 2017, @07:14AM
If you're getting C programmers from a newspaper, you'll end up having to hire someone like me who's made a good part of his living cleaning up people's messes. A recent firmware program was done by very cheap bidding, and the resulting code quality was filled with memory initialization errors, deadlocks, and plenty more issues along that way such as dangling pointers. I've used Rust pretty heavily for a personal project that I may try selling in the future, and I'm all around happy with it as it prevents you from blowing off a foot.
Even dealing with nearly a decade of C experience I've made mistakes that weren't obvious at first, and a linter sometimes fails to catch. I rather be in a world where I can't make those mistakes than one where something could slip by.
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