mimblewimble team mailing list archive

[Yeastplume <yeastplume@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Alberto,

I didn’t make the original choice, but Rust provides all sorts of safety mechanisms which take a while to learn and adapt to, but once you do, code you write generally behaves exactly how you expected, with little possibility of hard-to-trace pointer/memory allocation/buffer overflow/casting/whathaveyou issues that are a feature of every C/C+ project. It also means a lot less time debugging, testing for odd memory cases, and chasing down the obscure issues that will inevitably occur in the field. Yes you can set up all sorts of conventions in a C project to protect against this, but with Rust, you generally don’t have to.

As for the language choice being a ‘barrier,’ if it keeps out the type of "engineer" who can’t/won’t trouble themselves to learn a new language, then I’m happy it's in place. Sorry for sounding a bit harsh, but I can’t find a way to express that sentiment more delicately.

YP


> On 13 Oct 2017, at 11:15, Alberto Garcia <agarciaillera@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm very interested in your project since it solves very important problems in current cryptocurrencies out there. 
> 
> I would like to collaborate and help you with the coding but I realized that the language used is Rust and not something more "standard" as C/C++. Was reading about Rust and saw that it's similar than C++ but designed for better memory safety. 
> 
> Just wondering why are you using Rust since I think it creates a barrier for a lot of developers interested in the project but not familiarized with something like Rust.
> 
> Actually, this article explains very well what I want to say with the language election: 
> https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0324/ <https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0324/>
> 
> Anyway thank you very much for the time you all put in this project.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> 
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