this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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But what is wrong with C and C++ apart from the ISO fuck-up (ahem, slow updates)? There's a lot of technical debt, so wouldn't it be better to create an alt-language compiler that adds improvement over C, so that migration is possible in multiple stages?
Something like:
(notice: I am not a Rust or C/C++ expert)
Doing all that is creating a completely separate programming language from C. Rust is that programming language.
Rust does that with modules and crates.
You mean having consistent/universal style guidelines? Rust pretty much has that with rustfmt.
Safe Rust is memory safe (using things like the borrow checker), and Unsafe Rust is (usually?) separated using the
unsafekeyword.Although Unsafe Rust seems to be quite a mess, idk haven't tried it
Rust has macros, iterators, lambdas, etc. C doesn't have those. C++ probably has those but in a really weird C++ way.
I should have framed my words better, I guess. Rust is a radically different language, and honestly, none of the feature it offers fixes the main issue, that is technical debt - I mean yes, there's incline C or FFI, but that's still going to be a radical migration.
What I'm trying to propose is an alternative project, independent from the ISO. Maybe it could be a C-to-Rust, or a C-to-Vale migration project. It could be any of the modern language, I don't really care. But that particular compiler/transpiler/migrationpiler/-piler should have the ability to do step-by-step migration.
Those do exist for rust. https://github.com/immunant/c2rust
It produces a pretty much 1:1 mirror of the c program which means that it's still wildy unsafe and nonidiomatic rust.
But then you can go ahead and part by part convert to safe and idiomatic rust.
That would complicate things even more.
Rust has pretty sophisticated guarantees in terms of memory safety. If you'd add the step of another compiler, you'd have to guarantee that a) the transpiler still produces memory safe C and that a given C compiler actually turns that C code into memory safe assembler.
BTW: you don't have to rewrite everything immediately, you can integrate rust into existing C and vice versa. Apparently it's not trivial, but possible. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation