On Wednesday, 27 January 2016 at 08:08:30 UTC, Tobias Müller
wrote:
If you want to attract new programmers you should stop
constantly bashing other programming languages on the public
forums.
This is one thing that Rust got right.
Tobi
I know I should just let this go, because time is valuable, but
anyway...
All language comparisons involve "bashing" other languages.
Otherwise there is no answer when someone asks "Why language X
rather than language Y?"
Forget about random posters on a forum. Let's go to the Rust
homepage, click the link https://github.com/ctjhoa/rust-learning
and then click on Why Rust?
http://www.oreilly.com/programming/free/files/why-rust.pdf
That's not a random forum post. It's a document promoting Rust,
linked on the Rust homepage, and produced by O'Reilly. Here are a
few quotes:
"It’s difficult to write secure code. It’s common for security
exploits to leverage bugs in the way C and C++ programs handle
memory, and it has been so at least since the Morris virus, the
first Internet virus to be carefully analyzed, took advantage of
a buffer overflow bug to propagate itself from one machine to
the next in 1988."
"It’s very difficult to write multithreaded code, which is the
only way to exploit the abilities of modern machines. Each new
generation of hardware brings us, instead of faster processors,
more of them; now even midrange mobile devices have multiple
cores. Taking advantage of this entails writing multithreaded
code, but even experienced programmers approach that task with
caution: concurrency introduces broad new classes of bugs, and
can make ordinary bugs much harder to reproduce."
"In allowing an array reference to affect the behavior of a
subsequent return statement, my C compiler is fully
standards-compliant. An “undefined” operation doesn’t just
produce an unspecified result: it is allowed to cause the program
to do anything at all."
And ironically, in this very thread, a C++ programmer has called
D a toy language.
