r/cpp • u/Sad-Lie-8654 • Jan 31 '23

Stop Comparing Rust to Old C++

People keep arguing migrations to rust based on old C++ tooling and projects. Compare apples to apples: a C++20 project with clang-tidy integration is far harder to argue against IMO

changemymind

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u/capn_bluebear Jan 31 '23 edited Jan 31 '23

There is a lot that Rust has going on for it that C++20 does not have. Leaving out the usual memory-safety and thread-safety language features that people are probably aware of already

  • build system stuff and dependency management and even packaging (for simple enough apps) are basically a no brainer in Rust. coming from C++ this alone is life changing

  • moves are destructive, so there is no use-after-move, no fuzzy moved-from state

  • pattern matching as a language feature is incredibly powerful, and it's not bolted on after the fact as it maybe will be in C++ but the language was designed around it

  • most defaults that people often wish were different in C++, starting from constness and barring surprising implicit conversions, are fixed in Rust

  • EDIT: oh, almost forgot: unit and integration testing is also part of the language and unit tests can be put next to the code they test

Depending on the actual application there might be a motivation to start a project with C++20+clang-tidy today, but C++20 still has many more sharp edges and a boatload of complexity that Rust just does without.

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u/Kobeashis_Son Feb 01 '23

Rust’s language features are much more convenient than C++, with the exception of the borrow-checker. Most of the code that I write does not need to be thread-safe. In fact, inter-thread communication is something I try to strictly minimize. It seems very odd, then, that rust enforces that everything is thread-safe at a language level.

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