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?
I’m going to advocate for C here: the sheer simplicity, fast compile times, and power it gives you means it’s not a bad language, even after all these years. Couple that with the fact that everything supports it.
Rust, while I don’t actually know how to write it, seems much more difficult to learn, slower to compile, and if you want to do anything with memory, you have to fight the compiler.
And memory bugs are only a subset of bugs that can be exploited in a program. Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.
In cases where bugs have been counted they tended to make up the majority of vulnerabilities. Chrome, Firefox, and Windows reported that around 70% of security vulnerabilites were memory corruption. Yes a subset, but the majority of the worst subset.
I’ve also heard that unsafe Rust is even more dangerous than C. I guess that’s probably something to do with the fact that you’re always on your toes in C vs Rust? I don’t know. But if you need to do any sort of manual memory management you’re going to need unsafe Rust.
The thing is the whole c program is unsafe. In rust individual parts are marked unsafe. This means auditing should be easier. Also being always on your toes isn’t really viable. Breaking down the program into safe vs unsafe is probably an improvment
No, rust is stricter because you need to think a lot more about whether weird edge cases in your unsafe code can potentially cause UB. For ex. If your data structure relies on the
Ordinterface (which gives you comparison operators and total ordering), and someone implements Ord wrong, you aren’t allowed to commit UB still. In C++ land I’d venture to guess most any developer won’t care - that’s a bug with your code and not the data structure.It’s also more strict because rusts referencing rules are a lot harder then C’s, since they’re all effectively
restrictby default, and just turning a pointer into a reference for a little bit to call a function means that you have to abide by those restrictions now without the help of the compiler.Unsafe code should be a very, very small part of any Rust codebase. Lots of major libraries have a policy against including any unsafe code at all, because 99.9% of the time you can do just as well with safe cost. The major exception is when you need to call C code.
Bait used to be believable 🚬
You’re in the wrong place if you want to pitch C over Rust 😅
I’ve written quite a bit of Rust and a lot of C and C++ code. I’ll take Rust over C or C++ for any task, including ones where memory safety isn’t a concern. Yes, there’s a learning curve, but overall it’s just more pleasant to use. Now that I’m used to it, writing C++ code feels just as much like fighting the compiler as Rust ever did.
I’m going to probably be downvoted to Hell, but I disagree wholly that it’s the language’s fault that people can exploit their programs. I’d say it’s experience by the programmer that is at fault, and that’s due to this bootcamp nature of learning programming.
I’d also blame businesses that emphasize quantity over quality, which then gets reflected in academia because schools are teaching to what they believe business wants in a programmer. So they’re just churning out lazy programmers who don’t know any better.
There needs to be an earnest revival of good programming as a whole; regardless of language, but also specifically to language. We also need to stop trying to churn out programmers in the shortest time possible. That’s doing no one any good.
That’s my two cents.
