C++ as First Language seems like an especially terrible idea to me. Maybe I should take a few months and go do one of those courses and see whether it's as bad as I expect.

The nice thing about Rust as First Language (which I'm not sure I'd endorse, but it can't be as bad as C++) is that because safe Rust ropes off so many footguns it's extremely unlikely that you'll be seriously injured by your lack of understanding as a beginner. You may not be able to do something because you didn't yet understand how - or you might do something in a terribly sub-optimal way, but you're not likely to accidentally write nonsense without realising and have that seem to work.

For example yesterday there was that piece where the author seems to have misunderstood how heap allocation works in Rust. But, in safe Rust that's actually harmless. If they write their mistake it won't compile, maybe they figure out why, maybe they give up and can't use heap allocation until they learn more.

I haven't thought too hard about Zig as first language, because to me the instability rules that out. Lecturers hate teaching moving targets.

As somebody that "learned" C++ (Borland C++... the aggressively blue memories...) first at a very young age, I heartily agree.

Rust just feels natural now. Possibly because I was exposed to this harsh universe of problems early. Most of the stupid traps that I fell into are clearly marked and easy to avoid.

It's just so easy to write C++ that seems like it works until it doesn't...

That's true, but as someone that doesn't do much rust, C++ is a language where there are fewer restrictions and you can use little parts of the language, whereas Rust is supposed to be a simpler language overall, but with more concepts to learn up-front to prevent things that happen where there are no rules....

You can use "little parts of the language" in Rust too; the cleanest and most foundational part of Rust is pure value-based programming with no mutability or referencing at all, much like in a functional language (but with affine types!). Everything else is built quite cleanly on top of that foundation, even interior mutability which is often considered incredibly obscure. (It's called "interior" because the outer cell's identity doesn't really mutate, even though its content obviously does.)

Precisely.

You can subset C++ and still knock out a program.

You cannot subset Rust and still create a program.

You can absolutely make a complete, featureful program in Rust without naming a single lifetime, or even without dealing with a single reference/borrow.

But Rust is a dramatically smaller language than C++. The various subsets of C++ people usually carve out tend to be focused on particular styles of programming, like “no exceptions” or “no RTTI”. Notably never things like “signed integer overflow is now defined”, or “std::launder() is now unnecessary”.

Discussions about Rust sometimes feel quite pointless because you can be several replies deep with someone before realising that actually they don't know much about the language and their strongly-held opinion is based on vibes.

Exactly. Claims like "even without dealing with a single reference/borrow."

When you have this stuff in "Hello World":

Egui Hello World:

    ui.add(egui::Slider::new(&mut age, 0..=120).text("age"));

Ratatui Hello World:

    fn render(frame: &mut Frame) {

or

  fn run(mut terminal: DefaultTerminal) -> Result<()> {
      loop {
          terminal.draw(render)?;
          if matches!(event::read()?, Event::Key(_)) {
              break Ok(());
          }
      }
  }

And I didn't even break out the function chaining, closure and associated lifetime stuff that pervades the Rust GUI libraries.

When I can contrast this to say, ImGui C++:

  ImGui::Text("Hello, world %d", 123);
  if (ImGui::Button("Save"))
      MySaveFunction();
  ImGui::InputText("string", buf, IM_ARRAYSIZE(buf));
  ImGui::SliderFloat("float", &f, 0.0f, 1.0f);

which looks just slightly above C with classes.

This kind of blindness makes me wonder about what universe the people doing "Well Ackshually" about Rust live in.

Rust very much has an enormous learning curve and it cannot be subsetted to simplify it due to both the language and the extensive usage of libraries via Cargo.

It is what it is--and may or may not be a valid tradeoff. But failing to at least acknowledge that will simply make people wonder about the competence of the people asserting otherwise.

> Exactly. Claims like "even without dealing with a single reference/borrow."

> When you have this stuff in "Hello World"

Might be worth reading simonask's comment more closely. They said (emphasis added):

> You can absolutely make _a_ complete, featureful program in Rust without naming a single lifetime, or even without dealing with a single reference/borrow.

That some programs require references/borrows/etc. doesn't mean that all programs require them.

I don't get your examples.

The rust code you pasted doesn't show any lifetime.

The `&f` in your imgui example is equivalent to the `&mut age`.

Are you just comparing the syntax? It just take a couple of hours to learn the syntax by following a tutorial and that `&mut` in rust is the same as `&` in C, not to mention that the compiler error tell you to add the `mut` if it is missing.

Also 0..=120 is much more clear than passing to arguments 0.0f, 1.0f. it makes it obvious what it is while looking at the imgui call it isn't.

This seems like a very strange position, code written for Rust in 2015 still works, and in 2015 Rust just doesn't have const generics†, or async, or I/O safety, so... how is that not a subset of the language at it stands today ?

† As you're apparently a C++ programmer you would call these "Non-type template parameters"

I gave up on a C++ after trying to learn on and off for years. LNK1009 still haunts me in my sleep. I am now an avid self-taught rust programmer and I feel like I have the power to create almost anything I can imagine using rust. This is great for hobby people

I don’t know anyone that learned C++ first. Maybe I’m younger in generations, but Java was the first thing everyone learned at my university.

I belonged to the generation that graduated into the rising dotcom boom. Around that time, lots of universities taught C++ as the first serious language. (Some still started with Pascal.)

The main thing a lot of had going for us was 5-10 years of experience with Basic, Pascal and other languages before anyone tried to teach us C++. Those who came in truly unprepared often struggled quite badly.

I did. Though a few years earlier I had attended a class where Pascal was used (however, it was not the main topic, it was about robotics). C++ was what I learned first in a "real" computer science class. In later years, we did move to Java. And I initially hated Java :D but ended up making a career using it. Java in the 2000's was a poor language, but after Java 8, it has become decent and I would say the latest version, Java 25, is a pretty good language.

This thread is about Zig though! I want to like Zig but it has many annoyances... just the other day I learned that you must not print to stdout in a unit test (or any code being unit tested!) as that simply hangs the test runner. No error, no warning, it just hangs. WTF who thinks that's ok?!

But I think Zig is really getting better with time, like Java did and perhaps as slowly. Some stdlib APIs used to suck terribly but they got greatly improved in Zig 0.15 (http, file IO and the whole Writergate thing), so I don't know, I guess Zig may become a really good language given some more time, perhaps a couple of years?!

I learned C++ first. Like many I wanted to make games so I started programming before high school. I think our first high school classes were also in C++ tbf.

I should've said, I went to high school in 2008 (in Sweden). I'm definitely not the dotcom generation.

Crazy! I graduated highschool in 2008. I never got the games. Though now I do think I’m interested in learning a bit with C#.

Just after Pascal vs C craze in mid to late 90's for sure. That is quite a different C++ than the one of today however.