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Fair enough. I can cop to getting the CFront date wrong. Still, a decade since 1.0 is non-trivial.

> eventually editions alone won't make it, and just like those languages, Rust will gain its own warts.

That's possible. Though C++ hasn't had editions, or the HLIR / MIR separation, the increased strictness, wonderful tooling, or the benefit of learning from the mistakes made with C++. Noting that, it seems reasonable to expect Rust to collect less cruft and paint itself into fewer corners over a similar period of time. Since C++ has been going for 36 years, it seems Rust will outlive me. Past that, I'm not sure I care.






C++ editions are -std=something, people keep forgeting Rust editions are quite limited in what they actually allow in grammar and semantic changes across versions, and they don't cover standard library changes.

IDEs are wonderful tooling, maybe people should get their heads outside UNIX CLIs and MS-DOS like TUIs.

Then there is the whole ecosystem of libraries, books, SDKs and industry standards.


I'm not sure who in your mind is forgetting that, or what the rest of your comment means to communicate.

Who are you speaking to who hasn't explored all those things in depth?

I see Rust's restrictions as a huge advantage over C++ here. Even with respect to editions. Rust has always given me the impression of a language designed from the start to be approximately what C++ is today, without the cruft, in which safety is opt-out, not opt-in. And the restrictions seem more likely to preserve that than not.

C/C++ folks seem to see Rust's restrictions as anti-features without realizing that C/C++'s lack of restriction resulted in the situation they have today.

I only maintain a few projects in each language, so I haven't run into every sort of issue for either, but that's very much how it feels to me still, several years and several projects in.


Many of the members of the Rust Evangelism Strike Force, as main audience. That is to whom it is targeted for, given the usual kind of content that some write about.

I agree that Rust is designed to be like C++ is today, without the cruft, except all languages if they survive long enough in the market, beyond the adoption curve, they will eventually get their own cruft.

Not realizing this, will only make that 30 years from now, if current languages haven't yet been fully replaced by AI based tools, there will be that language designed to be like Rust is in 30 years, but without the cruft.

The strength of C++ code today is on the ecosystem, that is why we reach for it, having to write CUDA, DirectX, maybe dive into the innards of Java, CLR, V8, GCC, LLVM, doing HPC with OpenAAC, OpenMP, MPI, Metal, Unreal, Godot, Unity.

Likewise I don't reach for C for fun, the less the merrier, rather POSIX, OpenGL, Vulkan,....


> Many of the members of the Rust Evangelism Strike Force, as main audience.

Well I'm not them. I'm just a regular old software developer.

> The strength of C++ code today is on the ecosystem

Ecosystem is why I jumped ship from C++ to Rust. The difference in difficulty integrating a random library into my project is night and day. What might take a week or a month in C++ (integrating disparate build systems, establishing types and lifetimes of library objects and function calls, etc) takes me 20 minutes in Rust. And in general I find the libraries to be much smaller, more modular, and easier to consume piecemeal rather than a whole BOOST or QT at a time.

And while the Rust libraries are younger, I find them to be more stable, and often more featureful and with better code coverage. The language seems to lend itself to completionism.




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