What sold me on Rust is that I'm a very bad programmer and I make a lot of mistakes. Given C++, I can't help but hold things wrong and shoot myself in the foot. My media C++ coding session is me writing code, getting a segfault immediately, and then spending time chasing down the reason for that happening, rinse and repeat.
My median Rust coding session isn't much different, I also write code that doesn't work, but it's caught by the compiler. Now, most people call this "fighting with the borrow checker" but I call it "avoiding segfaults before they happen" because when I finally get through the compiler my code usually "just works". It's that magical property Haskell has, Rust also has it to a large extent.
So then what's different about Rust vs. C++? Well Rust actually provides me a path to get to a working program whereas C++ just leaves me with an error message and a treasure map.
What this means is that although I'm a bad programmer, Rust gives me the support I need to build quite large programs on my own. And that extends to the crate ecosystem as well, where they make it very easy to build and link third party libraries, whereas with C++ ld just tells you that it had a problem and you're left on your own to figure out exactly what.
Using your media example since I have a decent amount of experience there. Did you just use off the shelf libraries, because effectively all the libraries are written in or expose a C api. So now you not only need to deal with Rust, you need to also deal with rust ffi.
There are some places I won’t be excited to use rust, and media heavy code is one of those places…
> Given C++, I can't help but hold things wrong and shoot myself
Give an example. I have been programming in C/C++ for close to 30 years and the places where I worked had very strict guidelines on C++ usage. We could count the number of times we shot ourselves due to the language.
Isn't that their point though? They don't have 30 years of C/C++ experience and a workplace with very strict guidelines. They are just trying to write some code, and they run into trouble on C++'s sharper edges.
Low level languages always came with a set of usage guidelines. Either you make the language safe for anyone that they can't shoot themselves in the foot and end up sacrificing performance, or provide guidelines on how to use it while retaining the ability to extract maximum performance from the hardware.
C/C++ shouldn't be approached like programming in Javascript/Python/Perl.
I think it is a bit myth that Rust does not sacrifice performance. If you stick to the safe part Rust usually does not seem to achieve the performance of C/C++ according to what I have seen and read. I agree that the cleaner separation of unsafe and safe parts is an advantage of Rust.
The clean separation between Unsafe and Safe rust is precisely, IMO, one of its biggest advantages (and the reason why it'll be superior to almost anything C++ comes up with).
My median Rust coding session isn't much different, I also write code that doesn't work, but it's caught by the compiler. Now, most people call this "fighting with the borrow checker" but I call it "avoiding segfaults before they happen" because when I finally get through the compiler my code usually "just works". It's that magical property Haskell has, Rust also has it to a large extent.
So then what's different about Rust vs. C++? Well Rust actually provides me a path to get to a working program whereas C++ just leaves me with an error message and a treasure map.
What this means is that although I'm a bad programmer, Rust gives me the support I need to build quite large programs on my own. And that extends to the crate ecosystem as well, where they make it very easy to build and link third party libraries, whereas with C++ ld just tells you that it had a problem and you're left on your own to figure out exactly what.