What part of Rust is fun?
C is fun to me because the syntax is easy to understand and straight to the point. C is also great for learning low level coding, I find Rust so confusing
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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What part of Rust is fun?
C is fun to me because the syntax is easy to understand and straight to the point.
You probably had never the pleasure to search for bugs caused by C Undefined Behaviour in multithreaded code.
When I was writing my diploma thesis, I was writing multi-threaded code for an embedded DSP system. Results were wrong all the time. I tracked it down to atan2() giving wrong results. I searched for about six weeks how to fix that and it disappeared when I changed the position of the program's data segment.
(If the concept of Undefined Behaviour is new to you, I can recommend the web pages of Jens Regehr).
The above debugging experience was 25 years ago. We have better languages now. Rust has no Undefined Behaviour. That means you can track any bug (except compiler bugs) deterministically down to where the actual logic of the code, and the model of it which was in your head depart. This is great.
Rust is fun because you can compile a complex program and it runs.
But industry is still working with a fifty year old language written for systems where 32 kilobytes were a lot of memory. At work, I am still searching for bugs in multi-threaded C code with manual memory management (the previous developer didn't think this needs locks), and I have to explain to the CTO that no, wo won't have a release this fall, while the company literally drowns in technical debt.
Ok fair point. I mainly code in C for making GBA games and random projects, so I haven't done much multithreaded work
Rust has no Undefined Behaviour.
That is simply not true. See here for a list of behavior that is considered undefined in Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/behavior-considered-undefined.html
However, most (all?) of these require the use of unsafe, which helps narrow down where the problem might be, if you trigger any of this behavior
That is simply not true.
Yeah that is correct.
I was thinking in Safe Rust alone, and actually forgot about Unsafe Rust.
Because I have so far almost never used Unsafe Rust, except for C library bindings.
I searched for about six weeks how to fix that and it disappeared when I changed the position of the program’s data segment.
So it was a linker issue? I wouldn't call that undefined behaviour in multithreaded code.
But industry is still working with a fifty year old language written for systems where 32 kilobytes were a lot of memory.
Especially for embedded and DSP stuff there are so many architectures that aren't even supported by the Rust compiler. And on those systems 32 kiB of RAM is sometimes a lot of memory.
So it was a linker issue?
No, that would have resulted in a linker error, not random undefined behaviour
But industry is still working with a fifty year old language written for systems where 32 kilobytes were a lot of memory.
Especially for embedded and DSP stuff there are so many architectures that aren't even supported by the Rust compiler. And on those systems 32 kiB of RAM is sometimes a lot of memory.
These niches still exist but they get rapidly smaller every year. Because:
- Cheap hardware gets more powerful
- Demands rise... even some electric toothbrushes are networked now
- Rust support for embedded devices is rapidly expanding
Plus:
- In some domains, security is becoming a real issue
Also really easy to introduce bugs. But from how everyone online talks about being good developers is all you need. I don't know how those bugs get there in the first place.
I don’t know how those bugs get there in the first place.
Easy to explain.
Visualizing program code as cables, this is how a shiny new program would look:
And this how, for example in a commercial environment, or if the programmers are not absolute masters, such a program will look after 15 years of bug fixing, feature requests, urgent changes, deadlines, and unfinished restructurings:
The thing is that especially C code contains tons of implicit invariants which you simply cannot maintain in such code.
And don't forgot that the picture above shows perhaps 500 cables, but a codebase can easily contain 50000 lines of code....
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50 years later and we are still asking "To C or not to C, that is the question" personally i dont like nanny compilers telling me how to write, warnings are much more helpful to nudge me in the right direction.
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Interesting, that's a real change to the last discussion in the email chains where they kind pushed rust out of the core development and said they would need to fork the kernel / make their own smaller modules to bs adopted.
I still remember one of the maintainers leaving over concerns about multiple languages in the kernel and Linus Torvalds having to chime in personally to set the new direction.
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