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dbdrtoday at 7:39 AM1 replyview on HN

I didn't downvote, but I feel the last two points show a lack of nuance. It's saying "Rust doesn't prevent 100% of the bugs, like all other programming languages", while failing to acknowledge that if a programming language prevents entire classes of bugs, it's a very significant improvement.


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adrian_btoday at 9:47 AM

Nobody disputes that Rust is one of the programming languages that prevent several classes of frequent bugs, which is a valuable feature when compared with C/C++, even if that is a very low bar.

What many do not accept among the claims of the Rust fans is that rewriting a mature and very big codebase from another language into Rust is likely to reduce the number of bugs of that codebase.

For some buggier codebases, a rewrite in Rust or any other safer language may indeed help, but I agree with the opinion expressed by many other people that in most cases a rewrite from scratch is much more likely to have bugs, regardless in what programming language it is written.

If someone has the time to do it, a rewrite is useful in most cases, but it should be expected that it will take a lot of time after the completion of the project until it will have as few bugs as mature projects.

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