KEkerkeslager·Jul 8, 2016
This is the coolest thing I've seen on HN in a long time, and useful to boot. Hopefully this will be a very big help to people moving over to Rust from C for its safety and type-checking. In general I don't support rewrites because, as many experienced programmers have pointed out, rewrites often make many of the same mistakes as the program they're rewriting. But transpilation allows us to keep the code with all the fixes to those mistakes.
In theory I'm a big supporter of Rust. I strongly feel that we should be using stronger-typed languages than C for developing security-critical applications, and from the outside, it looks like Rust solves a lot of my criticisms of C without giving up any benefits of C. A transition over to Rust could be a big win for security and reliability of many systems.
However, I'm reluctant to devote time to l
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earning Rust primarily because it's not supported by GCC (or any other GPL compiler that I know of). I hope the next cool thing that that the Rust community does is to continue the work done by Philip Herron[1] on a Rust front-end for GCC. I know the classic response to this is, "Do it yourself!" but there are too many other areas of Open Source that are higher priorities for me, so sadly this will have to be done by someone else if it happens at all.
[1] https://github.com/redbrain/gccrs