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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 linuxrocks123 on Tuesday January 17 2017, @05:37PM
- The collaboration stuff you mention is what coding standards are for.
- Frameworks mostly don't make use of anything remotely obscure in their outward-facing APIs.
- Regarding rvalue references, they cause no problems. They're specifically designed so that you can completely ignore them if you want; you just won't get the performance benefits if you do.
Actually, even if you do ignore rvalue references, you'll still get the benefits when you use rvalue reference-enabled STL containers. What a deal.
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:04AM
very true, but unless you're running the whole show then the assumption that they're going to fit with your specific view of modern C++ is optimistic; for example I've seen guidelines that heavily restrict the coders from implementing functionality using template metaprogramming, which is a feature you seem quite keen on.
Everybody agrees you only need a "useful" subset of the language, but IME nobody actually agrees on what that subset is.
I wouldn't call unions (your example) as obscure; they're uncommon (mainly since C++ restricts you to default constructors for union members), but they're a routine part of the language, and quite common in places, particularly C-compatible style API definitions. Not to mention the wacky-hacky stuff you sometimes see on vendor specific APIs.
(And if you think unions are obscure but variants aren't then I'm guessing that you've never written a DBus client and had to figure out what an 'oa{sa{sv}}' actually contains)...
Since your OP mentioned them as "esoteric stuff" I'd figured to re-use them as an example - feel free to replace that with any feature of the language you personally hate, be that lambdas, assertions or whatever. It's not like C++ is exactly short on features to dislike :)
Sooner or later you will meet someone who will agree with you on the whole "why can't we all just use modern C++" thing, but will then name your pet hated feature as an essential part of the "modern" language. (Outside of manual memory management, perhaps, because everybody hates that).