Published on Oct 01, 2022
The Microsoft executive says it’s time to retire C and C++ and use Rust instead.
Should C and C++ be retired and replaced with high-flying Rust? According to a Microsoft official.
Microsoft Azure’s CTO, Mark Russinovich, tweeted on September 19 that the time has come to move to Rust for new development that doesn’t involve garbage collection.
As a Mozilla research project, Rust was designed to be memory safe, fast, and easy to use for developers. The 1.0 version of Rust was released in 2015. Since its inception, the language has steadily gained adherents and is updated nearly every month. Recently, Rust gained its own security team and is expected to be accepted into the Linux kernel soon.
Although C and C++ date back to the 1970s, they remain popular today, with C used for bare metal compatibility and performance and C++ used for machine learning and databases. Modernisation efforts have been directed at C++. Herb Sutter’s Cppfront project is an experimental compiler for a safer and easier syntax for C++. Carbon is an interoperable successor to C++ that aims to overcome the difficulties involved in improving C++, which is described as “saddled with decades of technical debt” by Carbon proponents.
Rust, which compiles to native machine code, is considered to be on a par with C in terms of performance. However, not everyone agreed with Russinovich’s suggestion. The commenter stated, “I must respectfully disagree; Rust may have safer defaults, but it has not been in production long enough to be proven ready to replace C or C++.”.
