Obligatory link to the Rustonomicon.

Should you wish a long and happy career of writing Rust programs, you should turn back now and forget you ever saw this book.

Unsafe Rust really just let's you play with pointers

This is the entirety of what Unsafe Rust allows

• Dereference a raw pointer
• Call an unsafe function or method
• Access or modify a mutable static variable
• Implement an unsafe trait
• Access fields of unions

If "just don't be an idiot" worked in the real world we wouldn't have any need for laws or safety regulations or certifications. It's not and never has been a compelling argument.

Writing C++ is like walking around a construction site without a hard hat and going "ah I don't need it, I'll just make sure nothing falls on my head." Yeah sure, buddy, we'll make sure that's written on your tombstone.

doesnt enforce memory safety damn all these stupid devs dont know how to write memory-safe code!!!

Even following the guidelines, modern C++ is just a huge pile of half-finished ideas. It goes pretty well for the first few hundred lines of code, and then you hit a very basic problem where the solution is "yes this will work great in C++26, if the proposal doesn't get delayed again".

$100 says his response boils down to "just don't write unsafe code"

Edit: It did. He also said C++ is working to implement optional safety features, but tl;dr:

Of the billions of lines of C++, few completely follow modern guidelines

Pretty sure this is a No true Scotsman moment. (I've always wanted to bring this fallacy up but I never knew when lol)

It's also just a huge fallacy. He's saying that people just choose to not write memory safe code, not that writing memory safe code in C/C++ is almost impossible. Just look at NASA's manual for writing safe C++ code. It's insanity. No one except them can write code that's safe and they've stripped out half the language to do so. No matter how hard you try, you're going to let memory bugs through with C/C++, while Rust and other memory safe languages have all but nullified a lot of that.

I totally agree with this comment, and on top of that I would recommend anyone who really cares about the current state of affairs regarding safety in C++ to read this overview: https://accu.org/journals/overload/32/179/teodorescu/

Quote:

Personally, I am not convinced that in the near future, C++ can do something to stop this trend. C++ will leak talent to other languages (currently Rust, but perhaps in the future to Cppfront, Carbon, Hylo or Swift). If the progress towards safety started in 2015 as Bjarne suggested, the last 8 years have seen very little progress in safety improvements. Even with accelerated efforts, the three-year release cycle and slow adoption of new standards will keep C++ a decade away from addressing major safety concerns.

C++ is leagues above C in this regard. He's rightly upset that they're lumping the two together.

Bjarne's work for safety profiles could indeed manifest in a solution that guarantees memory safety; time will tell. C++ is a moving target.

If you can write correct C++ you'll be able to write Rust code that compiles first time. Don't stress, you're learning the good stuff.

So how fucked am I for starting to learn cpp as my first language, or is this a later down the road thing to worry about?

I don't see why you should be concerned, except that no professional software developer is limited to use one specific programming language.

Even if you pay attention to the disaster prophets in the crowd, which are mainly comprised of fanboys implicitly and explicitly promoting their pet language/frameworks, C++ dominates all aspects of the computing ecosystem, which means that in the very least the whole world needs to maintain existing C++ projects to continue to work. See COBOL for reference.

I think it's a good first language to learn. Because it's a lower level language than most of the popular ones these days, you will learn a lot of interesting concepts and problems you wouldn't otherwise get or even need for higher level stuff - like memory management, allocation, garbage collection and cleanup, and pointer references - but which give you a better understanding and appreciation for what's in the black box.

But you also learn a lot of transferable concepts like typing, mutability, objects and object oriented design, polymorphism, etc. And there are still a ton of jobs where C++ knowledge is required or at least useful.

I have barely touched it over the years since first using it, but patterns and approaches I learned in C++ have come in handy for me a lot when troubleshooting and when reading other people's code, and being able to recognize who is going to be a helpful person to talk to when I run into problems I can't quickly figure out.

Ah that's an easy one - what would you like to do?

My first uh... "language" was bourne shell. Not because I thought it was a cool language, but because that's what let me do things I wanted to do at the time: automate heaps of Linux, BSD stuff.

There are heaps of libraries and applications where C++ is the choice e.g. video games. My friend is great at Javascript because he loves web browser tech.

Don't stress - have fun! :)

One can’t rescue a design by just adding things to it (regardless of the kind of design), that’s just a simple truth.

This statement could also be applied to Perl, PHP, JavaScript, and most other languages that eventually add new ways of doing things, especially if they preserve backward compatibility. I'm not sure that this is a condemnation of C++ so much as an inevitable consequence of being successful for a long time.

To be clear, I'm not defending C++. Just pointing out that it's not unusual in this regard. I have no doubt that Rust will also have vestigial warts in time, if it doesn't already.

Tell me you drank the Rust Kool-Aid, without telling me you drank it.

Bringing more modern tools and features to existing large code bases is "destroying his reputation"? Bjarne and the committee is constantly extending and modernizing a language with code bases older than me. Yes that means the old stuff has to be kept around but that is the price of allowing existing code to migrate gracefully instead of just throwing it out of the window. There is a problem with some missing rails to enforce current and saver techniques but Bjarne is not denying that.