alt Hacker NewsI'll await your Rust ports of Windows, Linux and MacOS then.
This isn't really a fair take. Keep in mind that C/C++ has been the backbone of the most important software in the world since the 1970s. At that time we didn't have virtually unlimited compute and memory at our fingertips the way we do now. It was a huge improvement to have a high level language which still could be optimized nearly as well as assembly.
Its staying power is due to the fact that we really haven't had many good alternatives until maybe the last few years. Things are not going to get ported and rewritten overnight, especially when they largely just work like Linux & PostgreSQL. We'd nuke a huge amount of institutional knowledge and inertia to change those up.
And C/C++ are still key in the embedded space where we still have devices constrained on compute and memory. That's not going to go away anytime soon.
This criticism feel like someone complaining about why anyone still uses horses on the day the Model T was announced. Change takes time.
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C is literally "high level assembly" and therefore lacks any guard rails you'd expect in a programming language. It's just unfortunate that so many software developers embraced C for its speed, even when it wasn't strictly needed.
I always remind people that C is a systems programming language and not fit for regular application programming. For that you need an application programming language like Pascal or Java.
That change is happening. Microsoft has been rewriting parts of Windows in Rust, Linux is accepting Rust code, and Apple is using Swift for core parts of their OSes.
Computers have gotten more than an order of magnitude faster since safer languages got into the same speed and memory ballpark as C, but we keep wasting that speed. The model T of memory safety was Java 31 years ago. (I'm not sure what lisp is in this analogy.)
They're working on it for Linux: https://rust-for-linux.com/
It's not a fair take in the sense that replacing the backbone of lead solder plumbing and paint in 1960's wasn't a fair take, and plenty of us are still awaiting the lead-free replacements.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
A pretty big part of the reason we didn't switch earlier is that most people—certainly most non-technical leaders, but also a lot of engineers—don't value correctness or security enough. We didn't have good alternatives until recently because we did not, collectively, invest in developing these alternatives.
One surprising thing is that, in the grand scheme of things, developing an alternative like Rust is not that expensive. It takes something like a small team a few years. Maybe a person-decade of effort to get to a viable point? Maybe two, whatever. The industry as a whole throws away orders of magnitude more engineering-years than that on vanity projects and internal dysfunction every year.
Of course, even once we have an alternative, the switching costs are high. And the barriers are far more social, organizational and political than they are technical. But even so, moving to alternatives incrementally has been viable for decades. And hey, if we include moves to garbage collected languages, we have been moving quite a bit... but we could have been moving more. It was only a matter of will and, upstream of that, cultural change.
So really, the problem isn't that people complain too much, it's that they don't complain enough :)