On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).
On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?
I don’t even think we really need to eek out every MHz or clock cycle of performance these days unless your shipping code for a space vehicle or something (But that’s an entirely different beast)
We’ve got embedded devices shipping with 1GHz+ processors now
It’s just time to move on from C/C++, but some people just can’t seem to let go.
That is the mindset that gives us text editors using 100% cpu to blink a cursor because their css triggers a bug in the web browser they ship to render the text editor.
You can be memory save without shipping a whole browser, but disregarding power and memory efficiency will just make performance gained by hardware evaporate in overhead.
Battery life is a reason. I’ve had clients come to me complaining their solution from another vendor didn’t last very long. Turns out it was running Java on an embedded device.
Why would java have an impact on battery performance ? Pretty much all credit cards run java for their encryption algorithms, and they need pretty much no power to run.
The JVM isn’t free. It was a simple data collection device that interfaces with a sensor which ideally doesn’t need maintenance as long as possible. Something light written in C is more than enough.
The Rust community has 2 websites that I keep periodically checking: Are we game yet? and Are we GUI yet?. The answers on those sites are respectively (as of February 2024, when this comment is written) “Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue” and “The roots aren’t deep but the seeds are planted”. I’ve seen the progress in Bevy and Slint, but it’s still the same, those websites don’t change, and my situation WRT to making a Rust project for fun or work it’s the same.
I’ll be happy to start doing Rust projects whenever I get the chance (which will be when it’s a sufficient tool for my use cases). But I’m tired of smoke sellers.
Have you actually tried making a GUI or a game? I don’t think you can summarize the state of the whole ecosystem in a sentence that doesn’t change in years. I’ve made perfectly functional GUIs with iced, and imgui. Haven’t tried slint yet.
Godot is a very popular game engine and it’s written in rust, so you probably can use it in rust.
Godot is written in C++ not Rust…
That’s true. I might’ve gotten confused because I saw godot rust bindings.
I’ve wanted to start a project in Rust, but for the ideas that I have (and the time that I have for a hobby project, as for work it’s rarely starting a new one, but continuing and existing one), Rust seemed a viable, but not ideal alternative to just doing it all in C++, for which I already have enough knowledge and very well proven libraries. I will look again soon, and I will keep looking because eventually something will surely click, it’s just that so far, the time has not been right.
Note that my point is not that it’s unusable for everyone. Just that it’s false that “some people just can’t seem to let [C or C++] go”, as the previous comment said. I can’t let go something that works well for something that doesn’t, given the projects that I have to work on.