Why I moved from Rust to simpler, cleaner C (opens in new tab)

This appears to be a april fools joke... judging by the Repo Lily was always written in C [0].

[0] https://github.com/FascinatedBox/lily/tree/9ed9a706e0a1f99ff... (Tree at a random commit a while back)

I mean, this is great, obviously. True spirit of the holiday.

That being said, rustc _is_ slow.

I can't tell if this is an April Fool's joke or not. If it is, congratulations, troll successful. But I'm going to go ahead and reply anyway...

There are exactly two valid* points in this post:

    - rustc is slow
    - "the circlejerk"

* i.e. not completely without merit

I'll just go through these really quick:

1. rustc is slow

Rust just shipped (in beta) incremental compilation, a technique commonly used by compilers to speed up recompiles:

https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/incremental-compilation-be...

This doesn't change the fact rustc is slow, but it certainly makes the developer experience much better. Try it out!

That said, rustc is still slow. A valid complaint.

2. rust needs unions

Rust has two types of unions:

    - tagged unions a.k.a. sum types. These are preferred
    - #[feature(untagged_unions)]: actual C-style unions, unsafe, useful for C interop

You probably want the first kind. Rust does have them!

3. linked lists are great

Linked lists are great! I use them in one of the main Rust programs I'm working on. The thing about Rust linked lists is how you write one will depend entirely on your memory model.

One of the best tutorials on Rust explains the language's memory model in terms of linked lists. It's a great read, a harrowing tale of "fighting rustc" until you achieve victory:

http://cglab.ca/~abeinges/blah/too-many-lists/book/

I'm using immutable arena-allocated linked lists, which is a great pattern. This is in conjunction with tagged unions, and together I have an immutable sum type + list memory model for a sort of Lisp-alike VM.

I did have to implement my own linked lists. The code is not terribly complicated. It'd be nice if there were standard one-size-fits-all linked lists in e.g. the "collections" module, but the type system needs a bit more work before it will be generic enough for that to be a good idea. Until then, you'll have to write your own or use a library given your unique constraints. But that's not really different from C...

4. "the circlejerk" a.k.a. the community

If you dislike the community there's not a lot to say. It's probably a bad idea to use a language whose community you dislike.

I personally think Rust has a great community.

5. rust's safety is overrated

C programmers routinely make memory safety mistakes, even if they're experts, even if they're using static analysis tools. You don't have to use Rust to have a safe memory model... any JVM language or most other managed language runtimes will do.

If you're writing a trivial C program it's possible it's safe. But it only takes one mistake for things to go from safe to catastrophic in C.

I liked the part about the parser not benefitting from memory safety(parsers are a classic source of CVEs).

I checked out the Lily tutorial (https://fascinatedbox.github.io/lily-site/tutorial.html) and the syntax is unusually clean. Really cool!

> "Every time there is a post on Hacker News or Reddit about a vulnerability in C, the strike team comes out to mention a rewrite in Rust"

I thought it was only happening with Go posts, but I can see it's happening with C and C++ too, which other programming language do you know is suffering Rust attacks ??