Posted by susam 4/13/2025
The new battle has begun with three major contenders: C, Golang, and Rust. Which one will be chosen for the future?
A similar thing is happening with game engines. If everyone is taught Unreal engine then you don't get in-house engines anymore which requires skill, because it's easier and cheaper to get some replaceable grunt to implement it in Unreal, perhaps with some off-the-shelf assets, which is perceived as "good enough".
It will be interesting to see how AI generation of code changes development tooling and the skills required.
this is a surprising statement --- in tust you need to formalize the flow of mutability, which is a skill requirement.
so why do you think rust for the boss seems cheaper than C?
The way I look at it in terms of cheaper is that you don't need to be as careful, less need to worry about memory leaks which lead to exploits, etc. I.e. you don't have to track every little thing yourself.
Starting to make inroads with larger projects now.. Firefox's audio subsystem is in Rust, while Chromium's is C++ (w/ tools to help detect leaks).
Even D still has a nod to C strings in it, in that string literals like "abc" have a 0 appended to them that is not included in the array length. "abc" can implicitly convert to a char*, which makes it very convenient when calling printf.
(You can avoid some of the pain by using a big-endian length, and converting immutable Str64K pointers to Str255 by taking a pointer to the second byte of the length. But that's a terrible hack.)
Whereas by the time Turbo Pascal for Windows came to be, that was also sorted out in Object Pascal according to Borland linage.
As evolution to Modula-2, following up on Pascal evolution, Oberon had it sorted out as well in 1990.