by simonask | 2025-10-10 13:38:28+00:00
Cost is a useful metric because it reflects a number of relevant things: Time to develop, effort to maintain - yes, but also people turnover, required expertise levels, satisfaction, and so on. Whether or not you like it, you have to care about cost if you want to make rational decisions. I'm not talking about assigning a Euro/Dollar/Yuan value to each hour spent on a project, but you need a rough idea about the size of the time and energy investment you are making when starting a project.

> This is because 'Rust and C# exist'? Or is it because Java, Erlang, Visual Basic, Lisp etc exist?

Things have changed for three important reasons: (1) C/C++ compilers have evolved, and UB is significantly more catastrophic than it was in the 90s and early 00s. (2) As societies digitize, the stakes are higher than even - leaking personal data has huge legal and moral consequences, and system outages can have business-killing financial consequences. (3) There are actual, viable alternatives - GC is no longer a requirement for memory safety.

> To get them to pick a managed language over what they are used to is going to take a lot of convincing.

Perhaps you didn't mean to say so, but Rust is not a managed language (that's a .NET term referring to C#, F#, etc.).

Me and other Rust users are obviously trying to convince even more people to use the language, and that's because we are having a great time over here. It's a very pleasant language with a pleasant community and a high level of technical expertise, and it allows me to get significantly closer to living up to my own ideals. I'm not making a moral argument here, trying to say that you or anyone is a bad person for not using Rust, but I am making a moral argument saying that denying the huge cost and risk associated with developing software in C and C++ is bullshit.

> And then I really couldn't care what language was picked, in the rust world that translates into 'anything but C' because that is perceived to be the enemy somehow, which is strange because there are many alternatives to rust that are perfectly suitable, have much higher mind share already.

The point here is that, until Rust came along, you had the choice between wildly risky (but fast) C and C++ code, or completely safe (but slow) garbage collected languages with heavy runtimes and significant deployment challenges.

C is certainly not "the enemy" - I never said that, and I wouldn't. But that old world is gone. The excuse of picking risky, problem-riddled languages that we know are associated with extreme costs for reasons of performance no longer has any technical merit. There can be other reasons, but this isn't it.

> C is - even today - at 10x the popularity that rust is, it will take a massive amount of resources to switch those people over [...]

It's insane to me that anyone would limit themselves to a single language. Every competent programmer I know knows at least a handful. Why are we worried about this? I'm a decent C programmer, and a very good C++ programmer - better at both because I'm also fairly good at Rust.

> And they see all those memory overflows, CVEs etc as a given, and they realize that in spite of all of those the main vector for security issues is people, and configuration mistakes not so much the software itself.

"Pobody's nerfect." I'm sorry, I really dislike this attitude. We can't let the fact that security is hard, or that perfection is unattainable, be an excuse to deliver more crap.

> This is not ideal, obviously, but C, like any bad habit, is very hard to dislodge if your main argument is 'you should drop this tool because mine is better'

Again, that's not my argument. My argument is that you should be honest about what the actual costs, or alternatively the actual quality.