Rust is a modern C++/OCaml
So if you enjoy C++, Rust is for you. If you enjoy C and wish it was more verbose and more modern, try Zig.
One can argue Rust is what C++ wanted to be maybe. But C++ as it is now is anything but clean and clear.
It’s like people do it just because Zig is very comparable to C. So the more complex Rust must be like something else that is also complex, right? And C++ is complex, so…
But that is a bit nonsensical. Rust isn’t very close to C++ at all.
I know, timelines not matching up, etc.
Zig offers no such thing. It would be a like-for-like replacement of an unsafe old language with an unsafe new one. May even be a better language, but that's not enough reason to overcome the burden.
Rust gives us memory safety by default and some awesome ML-ish type system features among other things, which are things we didn’t already have. Memory safety and almost totally automatic memory management with no runtime are big things too.
Go, meanwhile, is like a cleaner more modern Java with less baggage. You might also compare it to Python, but compiled.
Are there any other languages that provide this? Would genuinely consider the switch for some stuff if so.
With Wails it’s also a low friction way to build desktop software (using the heretical web tech that people often reach for, even for this use case), though there are a few GUI frameworks as well.
Either way, self contained executables that are easy to make and during development give you a rich standard library and not too hard of a language to use go a long way!
- It was explicitly intended to "feel dynamically-typed"
- Tries to live by the zen of Python (more than Python itself!)
- Was built during the time it was fashionable to use Python for the kinds of systems it was designed for, with Google thinking at the time that they would benefit from moving their C++ systems to that model if they could avoid incurring the performance problems associated with Python. Guido Van Rossum was also employed at Google during this time. They were invested in that sort of direction.
- Often reads just like Python (when one hasn't gone deep down the rabbit hole of all the crazy Python features)
If you enjoy C and wish it was less verbose and more modern, try Go.
GC is a showstopper for my day job (hard realtime industrial machine control/robotics), but would also be unwanted for other use cases where worst case latency is important, such as realtime audio/video processing, games (where you don't want stutter, remember Minecraft in Java?), servers where tail latency matters a lot, etc.
Maybe I'll jump to Zig as a side-gig (ha, it rhymes), but I still can't motivate myself to play with Rust. I'm happy with C++ on that regard.
Maybe gccrs will change that, IDK, yet.
Rust is not object-oriented.
That makes your statement wrong.