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0 pointsjeroenhd3y ago0 comments

I understand why they stick to non-GC languages (performance, startup time, the need for maintained wrappers for native calls, etc.), but I don't understand why they don't pick better ones. Rust is nice and shiny but even modern C++ with some good conventions would be miles ahead of plain old C.

Languages like D even allow you to disable the garbage collector for specific methods, giving you the benefit of GC-less performance and characteristics in critical code paths and the YOLO memory management of GC languages in the wrappers around them.

I guess the answer is "because all the people over at Redhat know C"

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dralley3y ago

Well, work on flatpak started around 2013, 2 years before Rust was 1.0 (much less mature). So it's pretty new but not quite that new.

Just to throw out some guesses:

1) "because dynamic linking", if you're an OS vendor being able to ship one package to fix a security vulnerability instead of 50 is a big deal

2) you probably want to have a C-compatible API anyway so that it's possible to use the code from other languages, so combined with 1) the benefit of a language like Rust or D would be dulled slightly. Not eliminated, just reduced.

3) Less common architectures POWER and s390x are still relevant platforms in enterprise and while languages like Rust do have some support for them, C compilers for those platforms definitely get more attention.

chpatrick3y ago

What about modern C++?

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