this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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It's primarily about safety, not speed. Any C or C++ program should match the speed but not the correctness.
no, it's primarily about speed and resources because the comparison is often not against a hypothetical C/C++ alternative, but against an existing one that is slower and more resource intensive.
So they should say that it is written with performance in mind. I don't care how you achieved that. rust, c++, assembly, whatever.
Mention that it has very good collaborative editing.
Mention features.
VS Code is written with performance in mind. Compared with other electron apps, it's very performant.
Compared with even a sloppily written native app though, it's not great.
so fucking say that. Designed to be fastest editor. Show benchmarks. Talk about your features. I still don't care what tools you used to achieve it. It being written in rust does not automatically make things fast. It may even slow things down, in some cases.
I think you might care about this a touch too much
I care because performant and secure C++ is much harder to achieve while rust "shepherds" you towards it.
See https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/03/its-not-what-programming-languages-do.html
I don't care how easy it is for the developer. And modern c++ is slightly harder than rust, but not all that difficult to get right with smart pointers and iterators etc.
If you care about your software being stable and secure, you should care about how easy the programming language used makes and encourages that.
People aren't robots and make mistakes often.
translating readable, maintainable code to an unmaintanable mess to solve a couple of issues thit might not be there in the first place, is not so much a winning proposition.
An os? sure. A text editor? not so much
Everone claims their software is fast. When stating that it is written in a native language it is actually believable.
but it didn't do jack shit to help me believe that. Because they did not say that that was the goal. So there was no credibility to affect in the first place.
Also, your argument does not make sense anyway. As a native language, due to some extra copying needed and some runtime checks that cannot be elided, it is slower than c++. It can be almost as fast, really close, but ever so slightly slower.
Electron is written in c++. A native language. A native language faster than rust (we're talking about speed not safety here). And yet, it is the canonical example of "bloated and slow". If you were to rewrite electron in rust, it'd be safer, but also at least just as slow.
So if the editor really is faster, it's not because the code was written in rust. It's because the devs are writing better code. That's why just saying it's written in rust is useless.