Subj : Re: macOS 26
To   : Nightfox
From : tenser
Date : Thu Dec 04 2025 07:20:52

On 29 Nov 2025 at 09:17a, Nightfox pondered and said...
 
 Ni> The only reason I've heard of people moving to Rust is that it has been
 Ni> designed to help prevent some common programming pitfals that lead to
 Ni> bugs in software (such as more protection against memory leaks, etc.). 
 Ni> It seems reasonable to me..  Even the best & most careful programmers
 Ni> with C & C++ can make mistakes sometimes that lead to software bugs.

Rust is, frankly, a better language than either C or C++, but
with good reason: it had 35 years of C and 30 years of C++
history to learn from when it was designed.  Plus it could also
draw on lessons learned from research in the wider PL community
over those decades.  But it's easy to do better when you've got
so much data you can learn from.

Rust is not perfect, and has made some very bad design decisions,
in my opinion: the `async` stuff was not fully baked and is full
of footguns, and the recent chatter about not poisoning mutexes
by default anymore is misguided and just plain wrong.  The learning
curve is notoriously steep.  But at its core, Rust helps programmers
write correct, performant, programs faster, and to do so across a
wide variety of domains.  That said, it's just another tool in the
box, and it's not the only language a programmer should know.

These conspiracy-theories about control, evangelism, attacks on
software freedom, etc, are just uninformed nonsense.

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