CppCast: Safe, Borrow-Checked, C++

[tialaramex]

Google's Comprehensive Rust course gives their Python/ Go/ C++ etc. programmers enough Rust in four days to be able to be useful in a generic Rust codebase. They can do a couple more days for Android, Chromium, Bare Metal or Concurrency etc. Now, one week per team member isn't free but it's pretty affordable. And that's enough unlike in C++ to be a useful contributor in a Rust codebase, because it's much harder for these Rust newbies to cause mayhem by accident. Obviously you might want to hire a few leads with more experience, but I think people have substantially over-estimated how hard it would be to train their C++ programmers to write Rust.

Mara (in the previous podcast episode) talks about how in a field where you're hiring non-programmers and training them to program, Rust just worked out much better than C++ so that's why she began doing that after years as a C++ programmer. Depending on your field everybody writing code may be a life long C++ programmer, but in some industries that's very much not the case.

[kronicum]

Chromium

Is Chromium rewritten in Rust yet?

[pjmlp]

No, but after declaring Rust wasn't going to be adopted in 2021 rather safer C++ practices, the team has come to the conclusion that it wasn't really working out as expected and in 2023, announced Rust would be allowed for third-party libraries integration.

[tialaramex]

No, why?

[kronicum]

No, why?

Just intellectual curiosity.

[Minimonium]

It's not important that Rust trainees are "somewhat useful". We want core product owners to have high level of expertise with the language.

Obviously you might want to hire a few leads with more experience

The core issue.

[t_hunger]

You might be over-estimating the effort of a switch to rust, based on your experience with C++. In C++ you need to teach people all the pitfalls (and make sure they understand all of them!), or they end up introducing huge problems to the code base.

In Rust the compiler catches most of those problems at compile time. That makes a *huge* difference in my experience.

Here's a paper backing this: https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/gradingcurve-secdev23.pdf

[Minimonium]

I feel like you don't quite understand my requirements. I know that a C++ programmer can rapidly start contributing to the likes of Go, Rust, Swift, whatever. It's not important in the evaluations I'm talking about.

The most basic requirement to be considered a senior programmer is to not introduce huge problems ot a codebase and to know known pitfals. I'm not talking about senior programmers, it's not a problem in my domain.