alt Hacker NewsZealots are a problem in every community, sadly. Rust zealots are in the unfortunate position of having the tiniest bit of objective truth on their side — all else being equal, most C software would indeed benefit from being written in Rust instead. The zealots just don’t understand (or acknowledge) how “all else being equal” does all the heavy lifting.
As somebody who’s fascinated by programming languages in general, I’m quite keen on Zig. I prefer Rust, and disagree with a bunch of things Zig does, but admire the language for trying.
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> Rust zealots are in the unfortunate position of having the tiniest bit of objective truth on their side — all else being equal, most C software would indeed benefit from being written in Rust instead.
But all other things are not equal, are they? A vital piece of software written in C that has been battle-tested and optimized throughout its two, three, four decades or more of existence does not magically improve if it gets rewritten in Rust. Not only does that not make sense in theory, we've also seen it in reality with the issues with the coreutils rewrites.
You can make a solid argument that new software written completely from zero would be better served by being written in Rust than C. But the "just rewrite it bro" types are so incredibly obnoxious and out of step with reality.
> all else being equal, most C software would indeed benefit from being written in Rust instead
I don't even think this is true.
You can certainly say "the security of computer systems would be a little bit better if most software was written in memory safe languages" (even more so if you went a bit further and said "with automatic memory management").
However, a lot of software exists and is useful, and the only reason it exists is because the author(s) found a way they liked to express that software.
So, for example, there are millions of companies out there, especially small ones, running all their finances on Excel. Not even accounting software. Excel. I am totally OK with this. I do not need all these companies to rewrite their Excel workflows into frontend applications backed by a relational database, even though that would be "better" in a lot of ways (more robust, easier to backup, easier to bring someone else onto...). Those little business owners understand Excel and build models and count numbers and they're happy with that. If some kind of edict compelled them to use something "proper" instead, they might not even go into business, and the world would lose whatever it is their business does.
The same thing goes for software and languages. Each language, whether it's F#, Haskell, Common Lisp, PHP, ... brings with it its own kinds of expressiveness and usefulness, and ecosystems of programmers and libraries/modules form around it. Some languages are a better "fit", sometimes for the problem domain, sometimes for the programmer's mind, sometimes for community building. It's difficult to compare any two languages because of this, and if you were to say "language X should not exist, all software written in X should've been written in language Y", you have to accept in your thought experiment that were that the case, their is likely a huge amount of software which would not exist just out of the people who made it not being happy about language Y and, if it were the only choice, would choose not to create the software they created in language X at all.