Should C Programmers Learn C++, Go or Rust? (2018)

https://ds9a.nl/articles/posts/cpp-rust-go/

by WoodenChair • 7 years ago

28 56 7 years ago

mailslot2• 7 years ago

Why not all of the above? Then you can choose the best language for the task at hand. They each have their own unique strengths.

geezerjay• 7 years ago

It takes time to master a tool, doubly so if the tool is still being actively developed, and the investment in time and energy to develop a skill needs to be allocated at the expense of some other activity.

mailslot2• 7 years ago

Mastery is different. You can still be highly proficient in short time without knowing every nuance. Then, you can choose which one feels best and is worth your time pursuing more.

kalium-xyz• 7 years ago

None of the above, renewal for the sake of renewal is not a good thing which we have too much of already in IT.

swsieber• 7 years ago

The people writing unsafe C today will not embrace Rust simply because it does not make their life any easier or more fun. If they were willing to do hard work, their C code would not be as unsafe as it is.

I feel like Rust has expanded pie for c-level performance languages. For system languages. I'm not comfortable writing C or C++ - if I miss something, it means UB. I am comfortable writing Rust - it generally yells at me if I were to trigger UB (modulo unsafe, which I stay away from).

Edit: Though I have to admit, my point doesn't apply to the article. He's only talking to 'C' programmers in the article.

unrealhoang• 7 years ago

This reason exactly, when I was learning Rust I had a milestone of complete - when I can reason the errors reported by the compiler, and comfortablely make my program compile. At that point, I could already let my program to run on production. Whereas in C/C++, when learning, there's always the fear of missing something, and without a C/C++ veteran in team to review, I would never trust my C/C++ program to run on production settings. All that is to say, Rust opened a whole new way (better for myself, YMMV) to access low-level programming for higher-level language programmers.

nazka• 7 years ago

This is a huge selling point for Rust. If you have a project done in C++ you will need to have at least one amazing developer in your team to double check all the code to insure that nothing can go wrong. You will also preferably have a team of developers that are medium+ in coding in C++ because if it’s a junior team the senior dev will spend all his time teaching and correcting the code his team does.

With Rust thanks to the borrow checker and all the help from the compiler you won’t need that wizard in your team. That means less stress thanks to the compiler and less management and you can have a team with a lot of junior devs without having the necessity to have anybody to be senior to oversee the code and you can still be confident to ship code to production.

krupan• 7 years ago

I'm a fairly seasoned C programmer. I actually started with C++ back in the last century, but when I had the chance to do plain C I quickly saw it's benefits over C++ (at least back then). I have long pined for a better language that could be used for embedded systems programming.

In my current job I am now using C++14/17 (not my choice). I'm starting to like auto, but not much else. The "smart" pointers and "move" are hard for me to reason about still. I'd have an easier time reasoning about raw pointers and references, mainly because that's all I had in my early C++ days and C days (of course). I think things like asan and ubsan are far more helpful even with plain C than features like smart pointers.

I've tried Rust. The author of TFA linked to another article explaining that rust tricks you because it looks like languages you have used before, but it's really not like them. That made me feel better about my experience. I found it to be very frustrating. I'll have to try it again with a different mindset.

I haven't tried go, but I don't feel like it's a viable embedded programming language because of it's garbage collector. At least not for tightly contrained embedded systems. I'm honestly not sure rust is going to work for those types of systems either. Sometimes you just have to poke bits into memory and I'm not sure how a super safe language will deal with that better than C.

pcwalton6• 7 years ago

I think things like asan and ubsan are far more helpful even with plain C than features like smart pointers.

I agree. Smart pointers are not effective safety features. They mostly add new ways to get use-after-free. (shared_ptr helps a bit by automatically bumping reference counts, but shared_ptr is often discouraged in modern C++, and there are lots of ways to get around this, such as "shared_ptr&".)

I'm honestly not sure rust is going to work for those types of systems either. Sometimes you just have to poke bits into memory and I'm not sure how a super safe language will deal with that better than C.

Read the "Writing an OS in Rust" series. Even in the kernel, you can have a relatively small trusted computing base and then most of the rest of the code can be safe.

bebna• 7 years ago

I'm probably the exact opposite, I'm more a Jack of all trades, master of none. I jump from language or framework to another without any remorse, just trying to do the best given time, resources and project needs. I did work with c (text template engine lib / x11 gui app / personal kernel module / dpdk userspace networking / arduino & pi baremetal stuff / ...), C++ (mostly some qt stuff for my old blackberry Q10), Java (I'm probably one of the few who liked Swing...), Go (backend servers), Python 2/3 (Some webdev, mostly admin scripts), PHP 4-7 (web/cli...), js (basic stuff and jQuery, trying to get into dart and flutter next...)

When I try to see my self in the shoes of a primary C dev, I wouldn't see Go as a concurrent to C, but more as a less annoying scripting language. Every time when I switch from a "typed" to an "untyped" language, I do need a longer time to "feel at home" again. Therefore I think Go could be good language for a C dev for small tasks on the site, like creating small cli tools for the buildchain or generally inhouse, things like that what one normally tends to look at python for. Go makes it easy to create a good cli interface, easy to document the format of a config file and writing a test. Deployment is also easy thanks to that is just a static blob that comes with everything that it needs. So no worrying about if the right interpreter is installed on that dev server, just copy it over with scp and it works.

pcwalton6• 7 years ago

The entire Rust section is premised on the common fallacy that "bad programmers", however defined, are responsible for the safety and security problems of C and C++. The conclusion is that, because "bad programmers" are supposedly incapable of learning Rust anyway, Rust's safety features are pointless.

None of that is true. The biggest memory safety flaws that have caused the most damage have been, more often than not, written by the best C and C++ programmers. That's because the best programmers are the ones who write the critical C and C++ code--Chromium, Firefox, WebKit, the Linux kernel, nginx, libpng, libjpeg, libc, etc. "Bad programmers" (whatever that means) can't, and don't, usefully contribute to projects like WebKit to begin with.

The problem is with the tool. Though it's an inconvenient fact to accept, humans have shown themselves incapable of writing safe C and C++ code at scale using standard software development practices (i.e. not spending 10x on verification). That C and C++ are due to be replaced shouldn't really be controversial--it's natural to expect that we know how to design languages better now than we did in 1978.

ncmncm12• 7 years ago

Equating C and C++ must seem compelling when one is exposed to C++ as it is written at Mozilla and at Google. Both places enforce coding standards that require programming under what amount to 1990s conventions, with a few modern tricks added. The consequence is that you get few of the benefits of modern C++, but all the costs.

Google and Mozilla might never get out from under their burden of enforced bad coding habits. It is a mistake to attribute to a language the flaws of one's corporate culture.

C++ is not at all under threat of being replaced. The number of C++ programmers is increasing at a much greater rate than of Rust programmers, and the language is evolving quite rapidly after its stagnation in the '00s. If you learned C++ before you could use C++11, you will be surprised at how much more fun C++ is now. Coding C++20 will be even more fun.

pcwalton6• 7 years ago

Equating C and C++ must seem compelling when one is exposed to C++ as it is written at Mozilla and at Google. Both places enforce coding standards that require programming under what amount to 1990s conventions, with a few modern tricks added. The consequence is that you get few of the benefits of modern C++, but all the costs.

That's just not true. Both organizations use "modern C++" everywhere. The new C++ proposals tend to come from large companies such as Google, after all.

People tend to assume that every new release of C++ will automatically solve all the problems with the previous releases until proven otherwise. This has always mystified me. Nobody has demonstrated that any new version of C++ has been able to stem the flood of memory safety problems.

It's interesting that few people can actually articulate why modern C++ supposedly solves the memory safety issues, other than just mentioning smart pointers. Smart pointers actually do very little--shared_ptr can bump reference counts sometimes and that's about it--and what little benefit comes from smart pointers is generally outweighed by all the new ways to get use-after-free in modern C++. Free happens invisibly in subtle places in modern C++, while in C free happens explicitly when you write "free()", which tends to be safer. In my opinion, modern C++ is significantly less safe than classic C++, which is in turn significantly less safe than C.

blub2• 7 years ago

The "bad/good" attribute is not helpful, but if we replace that with "people who obsess about memory safety or not" then the conclusion holds.

The security problems of C and C++ programs are caused by the fact that it takes effort to write safe code in those languages and most programmers/companies can live just fine with the safety they can reach with less effort. Bugs are opened, the code is patched and the world goes on.

And because those people don't obsess over memory safety, they won't switch to Rust either, unless something else happens to force them to. E.g: great job opportunities, official toolchain in Rust, etc.

Maybe C and C++ are due to be replaced, but hopefully not by Rust, because at least back in 78 they could create a language that's at least moderately fun to use.

pcwalton6• 7 years ago

The "bad/good" attribute is not helpful, but if we replace that with "people who obsess about memory safety or not" then the conclusion holds.

"People who obsess over memory safety" are in fact not writing in C and C++ these days.

The security problems of C and C++ programs are caused by the fact that it takes effort to write safe code in those languages and most programmers/companies can live just fine with the safety they can reach with less effort.

No, this is not true, unless you define "effort" as "10x normal development costs and time", which does not make economic sense for mainstream software.

ncmncm12• 7 years ago

Easy answer: Yes!

To first order, it doesn't matter which you pick, because we will all be better off than if you continue producing C code.

For production code, it is probably too early to switch to Rust, most places. Give it five years. But it won't be a mistake, then, to have five years' experience with it.

Rust and C++ will require more learning and adaptation than Go. Don't be fooled by C++'s apparent similarity to C: to get the benefits, you need to code the modern C++ way to reduce the window for low-level mistakes. Rust makes it hard to code the C way, so needs less coding discipline, but the Rust way takes more getting used to.

Both Rust and C++ can be substantially faster than C, for different reasons. C++ is better at capturing semantics in libraries. Rust knows more about what code is allowed to do, and can optimize accordingly.

Go is probably easier to switch to from C. There is not as much to learn. It's garbage-collected, so there are places it won't go, but most people won't need to go to those places.

It is never a mistake to know more than one language. In a sense, you don't have to choose one, you only have to choose what to learn first.

pcwalton6• 7 years ago

I wouldn't claim that Rust is "substantially faster" than C right now. In time, the compiler could be able to do more aggressive optimizations than is generally possible in C. But not yet.

Generally, I think the performance differences between C, C++, and Rust are so minute as to be not really worth worrying about. In practice, small differences in the way you write the code makes way more of a difference than anything in the languages. This is not surprising when you consider that the three languages literally share the same compiler backend in many cases (LLVM), and core operations in each language generally map down to the same IR instructions.

ncmncm12• 7 years ago

It is not unusual for a C++ or Rust program to be 30% faster than the C program it replaces. The reasons are worth studying.

30% may be no great shakes vs the 1000%+ available switching from Python, but in this post-Moore's-Law world, it is nothing to sneeze at.

flukus6• 7 years ago

Both Rust and C++ can be substantially faster than C, for different reasons. C++ is better at capturing semantics in libraries. Rust knows more about what code is allowed to do, and can optimize accordingly.

People have been saying this for decades about various languages and C is still the standard for performance except for a few specific cases. How many more decades until we can consider this "sufficiently smart compiler" a myth?

ncmncm12• 7 years ago

"Still the standard" among people who don't know that C++ is faster than C.

Fortran used to be the language for what we now call HPC. C was too slow. C++ is used now. This did not happen because Fortran got slower. Instead, C++ got faster.

The reasons are interesting. It turns out that to get faster Fortran, your compiler vendor has to code optimizations in the compiler. But in C++ you can code them in a library, and not wait on the attention of a compiler developer.

quicknir2• 7 years ago

Uhm, citation needed? Most of the most performance critical industries like game dev, high frequency trading, are primarily in C++, not C. Well written C++ tends to be more performant than C largely because there's just much less indirection in using templates than C equivalents (function pointers, void*, etc). And compilers are already smart enough to optimize out most C++ compile time abstractions.

yawaramin• 7 years ago

I'd actually recommend D ( https://dlang.org/ ) or OCaml ( http://ocaml.org/ ) over any of those.

- D is a safer, cleaner, more convenient version of C++. It has a Rust-like build system/package manager (dub), a sane module system, Rust-like unit tests available anywhere, C++-like compile-time expressions and functions, C++-like generics, and contract-style programming (which C++ is also about to get) for safer code. Oh, and the D compiler is known to be fast, unlike C++ and Rust.

- OCaml is a pragmatic functional programming language focusing on a sound static type system with strong modules support, rather than on total purity. It too has a fast compiler and targets JS as well as native.

ufmace2• 7 years ago

I think I'd agree that it's good to be at least familiar with all 3. I honestly haven't really touched C++ in a long time, and don't know anything about its newer and more advanced features. Might be worth doing? I honestly have no idea how you would do something like pull in a utility library in C++ without wrestling with makefiles and compiler flags.

I have worked with some Go, and found it reasonably practical, if a little boring and verbose. Not necessarily a bad thing if you're writing a big program with a large team with widely-varying capabilities. But it's hard to get the enthusiasm to write more Go recreationally. The standard library is remarkably thorough, though I'm a little disappointed at how bare-bones dependency management and control is.

I find I enjoy Rust rather well. I don't consider myself to be particularly smart, but I haven't run into much trouble fighting the Rust borrow checker. It does force you to think more about exactly what should own what at any particular time, and exactly what to do in any particular error situation, which is probably a good thing. Sometimes you have to throw some clones and random &s around to get things working, but I've always been able to sort it out so far. And it's the first language in this space with a dependency management system that actually compares to dynamic languages like Ruby.

majewsky3• 7 years ago

I find myself nodding along with everything you've said, except for this:

I'm a little disappointed at how bare-bones dependency management and control is.

Is that referring to Go modules, or to the situation before it? I just started using Go modules in my active projects, and I find that it matches your overall characterization of Go: reasonably practical, a little boring.

ufmace2• 7 years ago

That refers to the situation before it, I suppose, since I'm not sure what Go modules are. I haven't messed with Go much in a few months though. If it lets you specify somewhere which packages/modules your Go project uses and what versions are okay, and upgrade packages within the permitted version range without disrupting other Go projects you're working on, then it might be just what the language needed.

ochronus• 7 years ago

It's a pity the author misses on the nice language features of Rust. Compared to Go or C++ that can be more appealing to some engineers. I mean for example traits, pattern matching, immutability and the functional features.

ncmncm12• 7 years ago

Rust does (still) have the advantages of a clean slate. Default const, default pass by move, move that can't fail are nice things C++ can never have because they can only be in there from the start.

The future will identify other features, in other languages, that Rust can never have, for the same reasons. Rust is very quickly accumulating unfortunate accidents that will make is seem less shiny as it matures. That is just a natural progression.

Will Rust ever be mainstream? It is still possible. In five years it either will be, or will be fading and something else capturing attention it commanded. Only time can tell.

majewsky3• 7 years ago

Rust is very quickly accumulating unfortunate accidents that will make is seem less shiny as it matures.

Are you saying that Rust is rusting? :)

_xerxes_• 7 years ago

I very much doubt Rust is going to get much traction in embedded. C++ is barely being used and even when it is, it is usually "C with classes" being written by C programmers forced to switch.

watergatorman2• 7 years ago

A limited comparison of C, C++, Go, Rust:

Go and C seem to have a large number of available software tools.

Based on the "size" of the reference documentation alone, C and Go appear to be the simplest to learn for beginners.

A beginner coming from a C background might choose to learn the "Go" language, of the 3 available choices: C++, Rust, and Go.

Other than it's declaration syntax, Go appears to have been designed to be the most familiar to a C programmer.

C++ is very large and complex, just look at the size of the reference documentation. The 4th edition of "The C++ Programming Language" doesn't even have an "Appendix A: Grammar" anymore.

Rust doesn't appear yet to be stable enough to even specify a BNF for it's grammar.

Of course, there are other programming languages out there that maybe are even better for a C programmer to learn, but we were not asked for our opinion of other PLs.

watergatorman2• 7 years ago

C++ is a huge and complex language compared to C. [Compared size of the standard reference document for each.]

C++ is complex to parse. Clang and Gcc use back-tracking to parse C++ and there can be long compilation times.

Tiobe language rankings for May 2019:

Rust is ranked 34th at 0.335% below Lisp and Prolog

Go is ranked 19th at 1.114%.

In complexity and size, Go language is closer to C programming language than either Rust or C++. [Rust and C++ are much larger languages than Go.]

Lastly, Rust does not appear to have a standard BNF grammar specification and I counted around 33 FIXME unspecified sections in the reference document for Rust. I haven't even discussed the number of unstable features in Rust. in the Ref

Should C Programmers Learn C++, Go or Rust? (2018)

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