alt Hacker NewsIf your objective is just to hack something together quickly to test an idea, and doesn't care if the application segfault 6 hours later (eg. a prototype game engine), C++ is definitely the superior choice to Rust.
Rust is like the instructor demanding that you build your house up to the national code, down to the choice of nail for your floor board. Your house will be perfect, but building it is extremely difficult and high-friction. In many cases this is unnecessary.
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You can hack things together pretty effectively in rust if you put your mind to it (so many things that bog people down in rust are due to focusing too hard on premature optimization of either performance or correctness), and the easier to use tooling really helps with that kind of thing. I use Rust for small one-off projects frequently just because it's easier to work with.
> doesn't care if the application segfault 6 hours later (eg. a prototype game engine), C++ is definitely the superior choice to Rust.
I wouldn't say "definitely", given Rust deps management is way more streamlined.
I can get cross platform rust up and building and running with 5 minutes. It’s probably half a day at least for c++ and a more significant maintenance burden.
Also, I think the “quick to prototype” only is beneficial if you know c++ and don’t know rust. I know both and I can say that Rust is much faster to prototype in precisely because
a) tests are trivial to add meaning it’s trivial to add test coverage vs in c++ you have to integrate gtest and bother to set that up which no one does B) many initial startup bugs are prevented. It’s not segfault after 6 hours but spend hours getting it to work correctly after it compiles vs it runs mostly correctly from the first build.
Even if Rust is slower to write (which is only true if you don’t know Rust and don’t have AI) it’s still overall faster to develop in. I can’t recall if MS or Google have written up their experience on that side or focused only on impact to vulnerabilities.