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Fish Shell 4.0 drops C++ for Rust to simplify development and enhance performance
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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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From their blog post:
Hard to tank when you don't have many to begin with. Rust is far nicer to new users to contribute to then old C++ code. Which can be seen in their github - in the last 24 months 16 people have contributed more then 10 commits. Which is during the conversion period - I dont expect that many of those to be C++ contributions. So rust does not seem to have hurt their contributions at all and in fact looks to have helped.
Perhaps it depends on what people are used to. I use C++ regularly and I find rust syntax much too painful to look at.
Syntax is in a large part what people are used to. Which is trivial to change by just using the thing for a while and getting used to the different syntax. But syntax is only part of a language. The tooling, documentation, error messages, and general feed back are all IMO much nicer in rust than C++. It is also easier to people new to programming or used to other languages to get into than C++ is, even including the syntax into that.
C++ was one of the first languages I learnt - and now after not using it for years I cannot stand its syntax.
You may be right, I don't have enough experience talking to new programmers in order to comment on that part specifically, but I do think a sizeable portion of existing C++ devs who don't want to use rust exist, and this may now be a problem moving forward, especially if the C++ committee keeps dragging their feet and never adopt any new safety extensions.
Personally I think the swift syntax is much more familiar and friendly to existing C++ devs, but its popularity does not seem anywhere near rust's level for some reason, but maybe now that a truly cross-platform version has been released, it might gain some traction... maybe.
That may be true. But out of that pool of people it seemed that very very few wanted to work on the fish project. So it was not helping them much at all. The is a vastly larger pool of people that don't want to learn C++ and some of those may be willing to pick up rust. It would not take much for that to out number the number of C++ devs that want to work on fish that also don't want to learn rust. Given there are not a huge amount of contributors that regularly contribute to it according to their announcement blog post.
Rust was painful to look at until I started using it for more than 6 or so months