Being aware that the gun you're holding naturally tends towards pointing directly at your own foot does not make the existence of the footgun any more tolerable. Even the best developers will fuck up; having your language enforce memory safety is objectively a good thing, and arguments against it come from FUDDs and gatekeepers.

So true, this is also the reason I've chosen to rip out seatbelts from my car, since I know I'm just a good driver.

JOE BIDEN IS LITERALLY OLDER THAN THE FIRST PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE EVER

6502 assembly gang where u at

every programming language involves a certain level of abstraction that necessitates limitations. You could make the same argument in favor of assembly over a compiled language.

for some reason the president is a java applet trying to run in netscape navigator over dialup

beer brew here, ooh earth rider

Abolish class

Pokemon Ada to the Polls

For balance I’d like to say that I found Rust obnoxious. I can see the advantage if you are developing commercial grade drivers or an OS kernel, but otherwise lifetimes and the borrow checker only ever prevent me from doing things I can trivially see are safe, which is annoying.

I’m sure this will piss people off but it’s my experience.

A lot of the syntax is fun, especially pattern matching and error handling. I’m convinced that the way Rust handles traits is the way all languages should handle polymorphism (Allowing you to add methods onto builtin types without polluting the global state? Yes please). The borrow checker is frustrating at times because the set of safe programs is larger than the set of programs written in rust without the use of unsafe. So there can be things you know will work in theory that just won’t compile. But it’s ultimately a fun language to learn.

Not sure exactly what you mean, but Rust is a pleasure to use and it'll change the way you think about coding (even in other languages). It's worth giving it a shot.

Rust is the future. The website you're on right now is written in Rust. Rust is love, rust is life. My gravestone will be written in Rust. Rust is everything. I love Rust.

I found rust to be a pain in the ass. All the same inconsistent, counter-intuitive, and bloated syntax of C++, but at least some of the bloat is going towards memory safety.

As somebody who grew up hacking with C++ (on game engines like Doom and Quake) and has also fucked around a bit with Rust (early Hexbear days), Rust is very cool. There are no redundant header files to write. You don't need to install Gentoo to have proper dependency management. The type system is lightyears ahead of what the drunken 90s stupor over object-oriented programming produced in C++. You don't need to add an extensive non-standard library like Boost to make it usable. Basic shit like iterators work a lot better. Errors can be handled elegantly without having exceptions unwind the stack every time an unexpected result occurs. It has its own learning curve, but whenever it incurs pain it is fairly clear why, and what problems you are circumventing.

The downsides are that compilation units are much larger, incremental compilation is slower, and support for obscure platforms is nowhere close in comparison to C/C++.

I always liked writing C but never really had a reason to learn C++ super deeply. I wrote some for a project for a bit but was moved onto something else. I had previously learned C# and go and wasn't a huge fan of either. C# mostly because windows, Go because they don't let you do weird fun things.

Rust is a neat language because you can do a lot of weird functional stuff in the middle of some dry systems code. Because the compiler is such a stickler, you end up fixing most dumb mistakes from the get go, which means you get this feeling like your code always works the first or second try.

I found it overall a really fun language that gives me the "functional-lite" vibes of python without the typeless hell of python. There are some common paradigms that are a huge pain to do in rust, but overall I found the language engaging and the documentation is incredibly consistent and high quality so it really helps when learning.

I recently did a small IOT project on an ESP32 in rust, and it was a joy compared to dealing with json in C. I was able to write a simple protocol library, test it on my workstation, then use the same code without any changes and call it from the esp code. Rust literally made the project faster and easier. Especially due to the "it just werks" effect of the annoying compiler, far less weird runtime errors on an embedded device is just a delight.

Rust is very complex, in part due to the obsession with zero cost abstraction that leads to caring about lots of edge cases like NonZero types. But at least when I've worked with it, a lot of that you can just ignore and write straight forward code, and it'll still likely be very performant. Although the Rust sort of philosophy vibes with me better, so not all might find that so forgiving.

I did quit using Rust due to its compile times though. Even using dependencies that would advertise fast building like Bevy quickly started taking more than a minute to build (not from scratch, just making one line changes). And during that minute I'd get bored and do something else, and my productivity plummeted.

C++ and even more so C are programming languages which require the programmer to manage memory resources (although newer versions have introduced features that automate much of it). Doing this incorrectly can introduce vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to access data that they're not supposed to. Rust and Go are newer languages that are designed to mitigate this danger. The Linux Kernel is perhaps the most influential software project still being written entirely in C.

As for why the White House has something to say about it, I got no idea. I would have assumed this would be under the purview of NIST or something.

Revisionism