[VivaTechnics]

We switched to Rust. Generally, are there specific domains or applications where C/C++ remain preferable? Many exist—but are there tasks Rust fundamentally cannot handle or is a weak choice?

[pjmlp]

Yes, all the industries where C and C++ are the industry standards like Khronos APIs, POSIX, CUDA, DirectX, Metal, console devkits, LLVM and GCC implementation,....

Not only you are faced with creating your own wrappers, if no one else has done it already.

The tooling, for IDEs and graphical debuggers, assumes either C or C++, so it won't be there for Rust.

Ideally the day will come where those ecosystems might also embrace Rust, but that is still decades away maybe.

[uecker]

Advantages of C are short compilation time, portability, long-term stability, widely available expertise and training materials, less complexity.

IMHO you can today deal with UB just fine in C if you want to by following best practices, and the reasons given when those are not followed would also rule out use of most other safer languages.

[simonask]

This is a pet peeve, so forgive me: C is not portable in practice. Almost every C program and library that does anything interesting has to be manually ported to every platform.

C is portable in the least interesting way, namely that compilers exist for all architectures. But that's where it stops.

[lifthrasiir]

> short compilation time

> IMHO you can today deal with UB just fine in C if you want to by following best practices

In the other words, short compilation time has been traded off with wetware brainwashing... well, adjustment time, which makes the supposed advantage much less desirable. It is still an advantage, I reckon though.

[bluetomcat]

Rust encourages a rather different "high-level" programming style that doesn't suit the domains where C excels. Pattern matching, traits, annotations, generics and functional idioms make the language verbose and semantically-complex. When you follow their best practices, the code ends up more complex than it really needs to be.

C is a different kind of animal that encourages terseness and economy of expression. When you know what you are doing with C pointers, the compiler just doesn't get in the way.

[eru]

Pattern matching should make the language less verbose, not more. (Similar for many of the other things you mentioned.)

> When you know what you are doing with C pointers, the compiler just doesn't get in the way.

Alas, it doesn't get in the way of you shooting your own foot off, too.

Rust allows unsafe and other shenanigans, if you want that.

[za_creature]

> When you know what you are doing with C pointers, the compiler just doesn't get in the way.

Tell me you use -fno-strict-aliasing without telling me.

Fwiw, I agree with you and we're in good[citation needed] company: https://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg...

[pizza234]

Yes, based on a few attempts chronicled in articles from different sources, Rust is a weak choice for game development, because it's too time-consuming to refactor.

[bakugo]

There's also the fact that a lot of patterns that are commonly used in game development are fundamentally at odds with the borrow checker.

Relevant: https://youtu.be/4t1K66dMhWk?si=dZL2DoVD94WMl4fI

[Defletter]

Yup, this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43824640) comes to mind. The first comment says "Another failed game project in Rust", hinting that this is very common.

[ramon156]

We've only had 6-7 years of hame dev in rust. Bevy is coming along nicely and will hopefully remove these pain points

[mgaunard]

Rust forces you to code in the Rust way, while C or C++ let you do whatever you want.

[nicoburns]

> C or C++ let you do whatever you want.

C and C++ force you to code in the C and C++ ways. It may that that's what you want, but they certainly dont let me code how I want to code!

[mckravchyk]

If you wanted to develop a cross-platform native desktop / mobile app in one framework without bundling / using a web browser, only QT comes to mind, which is C++. I think there are some bindings though.

[jandrewrogers]

An application domain where C++ is notably better is when the ownership and lifetimes of objects are not knowable at compile-time, only being resolvable at runtime. High-performance database kernels are a canonical example of code where this tends to be common.

Beyond that, recent C++ versions have much more expressive metaprogramming capability. The ability to do extensive codegen and code verification within C++ at compile-time reduces lines of code and increases safety in a significant way.

[imadr]

I haven't used Rust extensively so I can't make any criticism besides that I find compilation times to be slower than C

[ost-ing]

I find with C/++ I have to compile to find warnings and errors, while with Rust I get more information automatically due to the modern type and linking systems. As a result I compile Rust significantly less times which is a massive speed increase.

Rusts tooling is hands down better than C/++ which aids to a more streamlined and efficient development experience

[kazinator]

The popular C compilers are seriously slow, too. Orders of magnitude compared to C compilers of yesteryear.

[ykonstant]

I also hear that Async Rust is very bad. I have no idea; if anyone knows, how does async in Rust compare to async in C++?

[teunispeters]

embedded hardware, any processor Rust doesn't support (there are many), and any place where code size is critical. Rust has a BIG base size for an application, uselessly so at this time. I'd also love to see if it offered anything that could be any use in those spaces - especially where no memory allocation takes place at all. C (and to a lesser extent C++) are both very good in those spaces.

[steveklabnik]

You can absolutely make small rust programs, you just have to actually configure things the right way. Additionally, the Rust language doesn’t have allocation at all, it’s purely a library concern. If you don’t want heap allocations, then don’t include them. It works well.

The smallest binary rustc has produced is like ~145 bytes.

[m-schuetz]

Prototyping in any domain. It's nice to do some quick&dirty way to rapidly evaluate ideas and solutions.

[eru]

I don't think C nor C++ were ever great languages for prototyping? (And definitely not better than Rust.)

[eru]

> Generally, are there specific domains or applications where C/C++ remain preferable?

Well, anything were your people have more experience in the other language or the libraries are a lot better.

[mrheosuper]

Rust can do inline ASM, so finding a task Rust "fundamentally cannot handle" is almost impossible.

[eru]

That's almost as vacuous as saying that Rust can implement universal Turing machines are that Rust can do FFI?