If you allow, I’m curious:
If you felt familiar with the language just as much as with C/Zig/Odin, would you prefer Rust for a completely greenfield project that requires no C interop (or none more detailed than say providing a general ABI)?
Just my opinion. It really depends. For systems- kind of software (low-level, DBs, file systems (also user-space)) no, I wouldn’t - if you manage memory with arenas and/or can plug in an allocator to tell you if you leaked memory (provided the codepath is triggered), I mostly get what I want with less mental overhead. Also, I very often want to interface with C libraries.
For games, again, I wouldn’t. I again strongly suspect I would and could organize my use of memory better.
I suspect Rust is best when you don’t want to interface with C code (except through bindings others wrote) and you’re maybe more doing applications development where C++ has also stood strong.
I completely see how, theoretically, Rust can make a great language for an office suite, browser and so on.
That’s actually also when I tried Rust for a personal project. I wrote a desktop application and while I spoke to C code, I only did so through bindings others had written.
It was/is fine :) I still got a segfault bug though hehe.
Basically I liked Ocaml so I have huge appreciation for all that Rust tries to bring into the mainstream on that front. I am just not thinking that the borrow-checker makes it well placed to interop with C. It becomes much better for relatively isolated applications work.
I like my datacenters like I like my railway infrastructure - covered in enough protective layer of rust that it will never suffer structural damage even when running for years under extremely heavy load.
