On 06/22/2014 11:32 AM, Benjamin Striegel wrote:
This is a mistaken assumption. Systems programming exists on the extreme
end of the programming spectrum where edge cases are the norm, not the
exception, and where 80/20 does not apply.
Even in systems programming not every line is going to be critical for
performance. There is still going to be a distribution of some lines
just taking more time than others. Additionally, in a single project,
there's a nontrivial cost in using Rust for the 20% of code that's fast
and using some other language for the remaining 80%. How are you going
to transfer Rust's trait abstractions to, e.g., Python?
> If you don't require absolute speed, why are you using Rust?
Because it's a nice, general purpose language? Systems programming
language is a statement about capability, not a statement about the sole
type of programming the language supports.
C++ can be and is used effectively in applications where speed is of the
essence and in applications where speed doesn't matter. Is Rust going to
be purposefully less generally useful than C++? There's always this talk
of "C++ programmers won't use Rust because of reason X". Which C++
programmers? In my experience the vast majority of C++ programmers don't
push C++ to its performance limits. Are they using the wrong language
for the job? I don't think so as there are many reasons to use C++
beside its speed potential.
Rust will never become popular if it caters to the tiny percentage of
C++ users who care about the last few percent of speed while alienating
everybody else (via language features or statements like yours). The
better goal is a) enable both styles of programming b) make the
super-fast style easy enough so that everybody uses it.
-SL
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