Comments by "Anony Mousse" (@anon_y_mousse) on "Was Porting To Rust A Mistake?" video.

As someone who likely spends too much time learning every new language that comes along, I can safely say that both Go and Rust are a mistake. However, if it was already working in Go, you're absolutely correct that it should've just stayed in Go. Rewriting a project in an entirely new language just because you like it is the easiest way to completely fuck up a project. I would argue that any new project these days should probably be written in a domain specific language, and if it's intended to run in a web browser the only choices are really just JavaScript and TypeScript and since TypeScript just compiles to JavaScript and is fully backwards compatible, it's not exactly different enough yet. If it's a backend application then the only real choice is C++. The reason being that it's a far better language than both Go and Rust combined and runs fast and compiles fast. Every time I use Rust I feel annoyed because it's basically a clone of C++ but with a shittier syntax and slower compile times because it aims to be more strict. Well, C++ compilers have all gotten better in nearly every way, and can enforce a lot of strictness on you while still compiling faster. Also, that part about not being able to interface between code generated with MingW and MSVC really hits hard. When interfacing different languages you have to compete with name mangling and a truly portable interface should be written for C compatibility, not just because you might just use C to interact with it, but because it doesn't mangle names.
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We're far beyond the times when a crash would lose all of your work. Now it's a logic error that results in accidentally deleting an entire database, and no language, not even Rust, will prevent that kind of bug. The only kinds of errors that Rust promises protection from aren't even particularly dangerous, nor as common as people keep claiming, nor do they cause as big of problems as people claim, and worse yet Rust doesn't even completely protect from them. You can even break through those barriers in pure Rust without using the "unsafe" keyword. If you were a serious developer who cared about safety, then you'd just learn how to actually program. It's incumbent upon you as the developer to provide safety for the users, not the programming language you're using. There are whole classes of errors that you can easily make in every language and if you expect that a language which promises saving you from two or three classes of errors to protect you from all the rest then please find a job in another industry.
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@Sancarn A safe program can be written without exploding the line count. I would even argue that if you focus on safety first when writing your programs that you can minimize the effect it has on how your code looks. In fact, you can use macros to clean up all of the bookkeeping for whatever project you're working on. Obviously languages like C and C++ make such code cleaner looking, as in no need to type superfluous exclamation points to gouge someone's eyeballs with the fact that it's a macro. If you use C++ you can write your code in basically the same way as in Rust, but it'll look cleaner when using it, even if not as much while implementing it.
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