New comment by badfishblues in "Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer"

badfishblues — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 20:11:47 +0000

I think any one who has worked with a code base that has to interop between languages understands some of the pain here. There have been projects I've been a part of that interop between C, C++, C#, and Python, with mandatory support for Matlab. This is a nightmare for maintainability. It typically ruins the advantages of every language with lifetime management. No more RAII in C++, everything is IDisposable in C#, Python and Matlab support require very specific version management. It also leads to situations where it is exceedingly difficult to find references to given functions, as methods get wrapped into different languages. Error handling mechanisms frequently cannot cross language boundaries, leading to situations where you have to do conversions. Often it also leads to non-idiomatic language code, as each language has a different idiom. It leads to silo-ing, because certain developers are better with some of the languages than others. It can lead to contention because someone wants to implement something in the language they prefer. Bindings are also annoying to maintain.

New comment by badfishblues in "Roc rewrites the compiler in Zig"

badfishblues — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 19:38:55 +0000

It will be impossible to ever truly do a one-to-one comparison. First, there may be a ton of code in the existing implementation that gets cut out by a mass rewrite due to better, more informed, architecture decisions. On the other hand, it may be possible that new features find their way into the rewrite that cause the fully Zig implementation to be larger than the original Rust-Zig implementation. I don't think any comparison will be fully "fair". A smaller implementation could be argued as only being possible in Rust or Zig because of its advantages over the other language. I expect results to be controversial.

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New comment by badfishblues in "Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer"

New comment by badfishblues in "Roc rewrites the compiler in Zig"