Item — HN Reader

Thinking that experience with C++'s many flaws will save you from running into them is delusional - just look at the number of CVEs in projects maintained by world-class C++ programmers.

No amount of fallible human vigilance will stop you from forgetting the existence of a C++ quirk in the code you're rushing out before heading out for the night. Human oversight does not scale.

2 comments

This is true ... except that Rust doesn't actually do any better in that regard.

Rust solves 1 category of problems in a way that is not without its costs and other consequences. That is it. There are projects where this is very important, there are other projects where its virtually useless and the consequences just get in the way. It is not magic. It doesn't make anything actually 'safe'.

sure, but don't forget that rust gives us also a nice tooling, functional syntax sugar like pattern matching, enums, monads; and other more or less useful things like explicit lifetimes

Of course. This is kind of to be expected as it has the benefit of hindsight of 25+ years. It is infinitely easier to design better things with all the accumulated experience and know-how of what works and what doesn't under your belt. It would have been truly horrifying if that had not been the case.

That being said, Rust is really about lifetimes. That's the big ticket selling point. My point above was that 1) it isn't a silver bullet and 2) it can be a real hindrance is many applications.

Tbh, only a mother can love Rust's syntax. It has even more "punctuation" than C++.

what is this 1 category?

When looking at the number of CVEs you'll also have to take the amount of code written in that language into account, a language which has no users also has no CVEs ;)

I bet there's easily tens of thousands of times more C++ code than Rust code out there.