It’s harder to quantify, but I wish there was more written about the benefits of Rust’s clean abstraction mechanisms in writing safe Rust vs safe C
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It’s Not Just Memory Safety - cleanly isolated logical components composed together makes it easier to implement each component correctly

1:58 PM · Jan 17, 2021

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Replying to @withoutboats
I think @bcantrill was quite open about these!
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Replying to @withoutboats
“c has poor to nonexistent abstraction mechanisms” is one of those things that’s true but feels rude to say
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Replying to @withoutboats
I've found this concept extremely difficult to convey to people. I've had the same discussion surrounding abstractions in JS so often, yet it's something that's difficult to illustrate concisely, and people don't believe it on the face of it...
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Replying to @withoutboats
Feels like analysis / promotion of Rust in general is very focused on the memory aspect? (I heard multiple talks citing the 70% number for motivation and always left wondering about the other 30%...)
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Replying to @withoutboats
To mez the big thing (almost bigger) is parallelization. I had about decided that safe efficient thread-level parallelization was basically impossible, and almost all parallelization should be communicating processes. With Rust, I can parallelize easily and without fear.
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Replying to @withoutboats
I feel like if C people wanted stronger abstraction mechanisms they would have adopted C++ a long time ago. Then again, C++ was a lot worse a long time ago, and Rust /still/ has better abstraction mechanisms that C++ (in my opinion).
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…to be clear, I absolutely want Rust to take over from C more, and there are likely still people defaulting to C rather than choosing it. For the ones who are choosing it, though, I think using Rust instead would be a paradigm shift, not just a better version of what they have.
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If you want to have a chat about this, I'm totally up for it. I have a couple things I've been trying to string together from rust embedded and safety critical experience, it would be good to have your lang design experience to flesh out the important parts more clearly.
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