story
And in the case of apps where objects can have very dynamic lifetimes (like game engines or CAD), the borrow checker wouldn't really help with you that much since you would have to manage these with reference counting or some other way anyway (ex. arena allocation + generational indices).
What Rust excels over C++ at this point is just sane defaults / less footguns (no uninitialized memory, bounds checking even in release mode) as well as some language niceties, but Rust has its own issues for pragmatic usage (slow compilation, lackluster libraries, cumbersome to interface with C APIs, ...)
Mature Libraries: C++ has a treasure trove of well-established libraries. For niche or legacy needs, C++ might be your only option. Performance Control: When you need to micro-manage performance, C++ gives you the nitty-gritty control that can make all the difference. Industry Norms: In some fields like game development, C++ isn't just preferred, it's expected. Sticking to industry norms can sometimes outweigh the benefits of newer tech. So, while Rust has its perks, especially around safety and concurrency, C++ still holds its ground where its deep-rooted ecosystem and granular performance control come into play.
No.
That is part of the reason why so many big companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.)[1][3][4] are pushing ahead on Rust adoption and large government agencies[5][6] are recommending memory safe languages over C and C++.
Google did a study and found that their Rust developers were twice as productive as their C++ developers [2].
Rust should be preferred over C++ unless you have no other choice.
[1] https://thenewstack.io/google-spends-1-million-to-make-rust-...
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/31/rust_google_c/?td=kee...
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/31/microsoft_seeks_rust_...
[4] https://blog.qwasar.io/blog/why-is-rust-growing-and-why-do-c...
[5] https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Pre...
[6] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Final-...
(Notably I've gone through this evaluation recently and landed on implementing my personal project in c++23 (using cosmopolitan if possible) mostly for the value of updating my c++ knowledge (and perhaps look into cuda))
Coming from a similar background, I have found Golang to be a nice, more efficient replacement for Java because it works great for backend web services, middleware, etc. Go is easy to learn and brings most of what is needed in its standard library (similar to Java).
Rust's sweet spot is where C and C++ shine: performance critical, maximum efficency required software such as operating system components, device drivers, media applications, etc.
Rust does have a learning curve, but most of what it enforces are best practices: 1) multiple readers or one writer resource usage, 2) organizing code hierarchy into trees, 3) sane patterns for concurrency, etc.
It is apples and oranges, in that regard. Some node guy isn't going to just go and pick up rust/c++ because they're used for quite different purposes.
As a general purpose language, Go is amazing. In fact, it is what I use day to day for all my needs. For my current business needs it is what all our services are written in. They are fast, and the go concurrency model honestly makes it pretty easy for me to forego a lot of extra add-on technologies that are not yet required at my stage and KISS.
For anything like super high perf, systems programming, embedded, etc. you will want to use c++ or rust.
This was the case for a project I am working on that was started in the last year. The interop features in rust (and other languages) are simply not as reliable as writing kernels directly in CUDA or HIP or even DPC++. You _can_ attempt to write the GPU code in C++ and call to this from $LANG via ffi, but if you want to preserve data structures and methods to work on both the host and device, its still easier to write it once in C++.
I would not want to be the one writing that CMakeLists.txt
More generally, if you need to use existing C++ or even C libraries, Rust is at best an awkward fit unless someone else has already built and is actively maintaining the necessary bindings.
I agree that the gaming industry is a place where starting a C++ project still makes sense.
It's really difficult to evaluate a hardware product with only a C(++) SDK using only Rust. There are of course ways around this but those are a significant amount of effort.
In terms of GUIs - there's simply no "Qt-Rust" that would work in a Rust-y way without causing massive headaches. Handling all that state is incredibly difficult in Rust, at least for me (but I recall others describing why as well).
Disclaimer: I work for Slint
First two that come to mind are tab/shift-tab navigation and being able to adjust sliders roughly with arrow keys.
https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/f9ce0b19...
Hadn’t heard of Carbon, very cool. Super telling line with the “Developers that can use one of these existing languages should.” Thanks for sharing!
Does Firefox compile with the shipped rust compiler ?
But just like Java, its almost useless to code in it for personal or smaller projects.
For almost all of my projects where I needed performant code, the way I would do this is write it in C, and then just call the code from Python or Node. Its much easier to just focus on low level performant C code that can be written in usually one file, and then just write all the interface to it through higher level languages, especially for web frameworks.
That's entirely the opposite from my experience. Rust is a pleasure to code in for personal projects once you're familiar with the language, especially compared to C/C++. Managing dependencies is more straightforward, and there are a lot of crates out there to make writing your project easier.
In general, think about the general use case for all types of development. For example, I have a bunch of finance code. I host it on a Jupyter Lab server in notebooks, so I can run/edit it from anywhere.
If I want something that is fast (which in this case is rare to see outside of using pytorch), I can write a C extension quite easily - the amount of effort that it takes me to set up boilerplate code is the same amount of effort as it takes thinking about Rust memory semantics. The code will be quite isolated from the rest of the system (unless you purposefully try to break Python), and you don't really have to even do dynamic memory if you are trying to do processing. I did this at work with fast json parsing and data extraction, and it was super easy to do.
Then there is the whole ML aspect, which is first and foremost python before anything else. Especially in the whole data sets, with the fact that you can easily generate training data in Python, whereas other languages require a lot of custom code.
It (just like so many other languages) is fantastic for personal projects. Especially because you can target cross platform easily and get native performance.
Proclaiming any non-estoteric language is "almost useless to code in for personal or smaller projects" speaks volumes.
I seem to be writing an OS with it just fine.
