Maybe a stretch for QotW as the comment absent context is indistinguishable from non-Rust libraries, but I felt this could bring a more attention to a neat Rust project in an entertaining way.
I don’t like Rust being pigeon holed as a “safer C++”—it’s so much more than that.
t’s been stated more often lately. It overlooks the fact that Rust has actively opened the door to systems programming to people coming from langs like Javascript, where C and C++ never did.
Slightly off-topic, but I've had the experience in the exact opposite direction: having written lots of C++ and having been constantly looking for improvements and patterns that ensure safety, Rust had basically no learning curve for me.
As the intern honestly admits in that blog, most users of high level languages have no idea where the memory is they are using and who else is using it. It's not something they think about until they get the segfaults and corrupt data.
Can't blame them. The whole thrust behind high level languages since forever has been to abstract away all those annoying details. Works fine in Javascript but it's an abstraction too far in the case of C++.
Memory in C++ is a leaky abstraction (see what I did there )
I came from C# where I found that low level memory things were kind of swept under the rug and left to the compiler to deal with. These kinds of things interested me so I tried C++. To put it simply, I was not prepared to deal with C++, so I instead switched to Rust, and have found that dealing with the details of low level things can be nice and refreshing little niches, opposite to my experience in C++ and present compared to C# (At least at the time and my understanding of it).
…man, starting to dig through the source code of a really large open source program is so weird. It’s like wandering around a giant cathedral that’s being constantly renovated and repaired and maintained over the course of years by a giant team of invisible crafters and architects, who mostly communicate via notes and designs pinned to the walls in various places.