HN.zip

The C to Rust migration book

19 points by LukeMathWalker - 9 comments
yablak [3 hidden]5 mins ago
One link deeper is the actual content; can we link there instead?

https://mainmatter.com/c-to-rust-migration-book/course/

matltc [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I've spent a good amount of time with C, nowhere near mastery though. Is it worth still writing C, or better off just learning Rust if my goal is to write embedded/systems code?
Aurornis [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Rust is worth learning, but your C skills will continue to be useful for embedded for a long time. Rust support in the embedded world is still growing and you will find yourself going between Rust and C on most projects unless you can carefully pick your platform for Rust support up front.

Coming from C I don’t think you’ll find Rust too foreign, once you internalize how the ownership rules work. In my experience the formal rules of Rust overlap a lot with behaviors that are good practice in C/C++ anyway, but there are some complicated concepts that you need to wrap your head around before expressing them in Rust becomes second nature.

pornel [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Technically, absolutely.

Whether it would suit you, depends if you can learn to like Rust's approach of moving more work to the type system. In Rust you do certain things the Rust's way, period. Programmers used to C being unopinionated about everything find that objectionable.

uecker [3 hidden]5 mins ago
C is a tool which requires expertise but then goes out of your way and let's you do things, and do things rather efficiently, with no overhead, and exactly how you want. If you want it to cut off your arm it will do this too. But if you want to abstract things away behind types, this can also be done too (and arguable should be done more often in C). Somebody should write a C to more modern and safe C migration book.
cryo32 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Depends exactly what you mean by embedded but Rust isn’t as common as people make it out to be there. In some aread it’s almost entirely unheard of. C will be king for a while yet. There’s a lot of Ada floating around too.
greenavocado [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Depends on if your embedded system has a nice toolchain for it and/or how much suffering you are willing to endure. Another consideration is if you have to collaborate with others. Most programmers don't know Rust.
tallesborges92 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Please do a skill
b40d-48b2-979e [3 hidden]5 mins ago

    and cheadergen, Mainmatter's tool for the reverse direction
So this is just an ad blogpost for the company.