alt Hacker NewsEvery system under the Sun has a C compiler. This isn't remotely true for Rust. Rust is more modern than C, but has it's own issues, among others very slow compilation times. My guess is that C will be around long after people will have moved on from Rust to another newfangled alternative.
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What other newfangled alternative to C was ever adopted in the Linux kernel?
I have no doubt C will be around for a long time, but I think Rust also has a lot of staying power and won’t soon be replaced.
I can’t think of many real world production systems which don’t have a rust target. Also I’m hopeful the GCC backend for rustc makes some progress and can become an option for the more esoteric ones
> My guess is that C will be around long after people will have moved on from Rust to another newfangled alternative.
if only due to the Lindy Effect
> very slow compilation times
That isn't always the case. Slow compilations are usually because of procedural macros and/or heavy use of generics. And even then compile times are often comparable to languages like typescript and scala.
> Every system under the Sun has a C compiler... My guess is that C will be around long after people will have moved on from Rust to another newfangled alternative.
This is still the worst possible argument for C. If C persists in places no one uses, then who cares?
Doesn’t rustc emit LLVM IR? Are there a lot of systems that LLVM doesn’t support?
There is a set of languages which are essentially required to be available on any viable system. At present, these are probably C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, and Bash (with a degree of asterisks on the last two). Rust I don't think has made it through that door yet, but on current trends, it's at the threshold and will almost certainly step through. Leaving this set of mandatory languages is difficult (I think Fortran, and BASIC-with-an-asterisk, are the only languages to really have done so), and Perl is the only one I would risk money on departing in my lifetime.
I do firmly expect that we're less than a decade out from seeing some reference algorithm be implemented in Rust rather than C, probably a cryptographic algorithm or a media codec. Although you might argue that the egg library for e-graphs already qualifies.