I made a comment about this yesterday[0], but there's been a massive increase in people migrating from C to Rust due to LLMs.<p>In contrast to what the C to Rust migration book is recommending (using FFI to integrate Rust with C), I've found it much easier to start from scratch. I recently finished a project where I rewrote Postgres in Rust[1]. For context, Postgres is about one million lines of C code.<p>On one attempt, I tried using c2rust to convert Postgres into unsafe Rust code. That attempt succeeded in terms of getting working "Rust" code, but any attempt to change any piece to safe rust, would require thousands of changes across codebase. Even though I had working Rust code, I found it infeasible to get to working idiomatic Rust code.<p>Instead what I found to be more effective was starting a new codebase and rewrite each file from the Postgres codebase into Rust one at a time. This allowed me to guarantee that at all times the new codebase was idiomatic and simultaneously I could make one pass over the Postgres codebase to get working idiomatic Rust.<p>YMMV, but I found it way easier to generate a whole new codebase from scratch rather than incrementally rewrite an existing codebase.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738985#48739882">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738985#48739882</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/malisper/pgrust" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/malisper/pgrust</a>
One link deeper is the actual content; can we link there instead?<p><a href="https://mainmatter.com/c-to-rust-migration-book/course/" rel="nofollow">https://mainmatter.com/c-to-rust-migration-book/course/</a>
I've spent a good amount of time with C, nowhere near mastery though. Is it worth still writing C, or better off just learning Rust if my goal is to write embedded/systems code?
Rust is worth learning, but your C skills will continue to be useful for embedded for a long time. Rust support in the embedded world is still growing and you will find yourself going between Rust and C on most projects unless you can carefully pick your platform for Rust support up front.<p>Coming from C I don’t think you’ll find Rust too foreign, once you internalize how the ownership rules work. In my experience the formal rules of Rust overlap a lot with behaviors that are good practice in C/C++ anyway, but there are some complicated concepts that you need to wrap your head around before expressing them in Rust becomes second nature.
Technically, absolutely.<p>Whether it would suit you, depends if you can learn to like Rust's approach of moving more work to the type system. In Rust you do certain things the Rust's way, period. Programmers used to C being unopinionated about everything find that objectionable.
C is a tool which requires expertise but then goes out of your way and let's you do things, and do things rather efficiently, with no overhead, and exactly how you want. If you want it to cut off your arm it will do this too. But if you want to abstract things away behind types, this can also be done too (and arguable should be done more often in C). Somebody should write a C to more modern and safe C migration book.
Depends exactly what you mean by embedded but Rust isn’t as common as people make it out to be there. In some aread it’s almost entirely unheard of. C will be king for a while yet. There’s a lot of Ada floating around too.
> embedded/systems code?<p>Depends on platform for embedded. It not very pleasant to write rust if you have to think about binary size. For systems code - sure, use rust.
Depends on if your embedded system has a nice toolchain for it and/or how much suffering you are willing to endure. Another consideration is if you have to collaborate with others. Most programmers don't know Rust.
Please do a skill
"Use Claude"<p>[the end]
<p><pre><code> and cheadergen, Mainmatter's tool for the reverse direction
</code></pre>
So this is just an ad blogpost for the company.