> Argon agents are working on migrating C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google
Man, I remember back in the days when the cppnext team was refusing to even consider Rust, instead looking at absurd stuff like Carbon and Swift (!), even though half of the engineering staff already knew where this was headed. I hope they got a few good promos out of the delays at least.
Carbon was clearly DOA the moment it was announced, IMHO. It looked cool but it served none but Google, and now with LLMs you have a massive incentive not to use a niche or new language due to how better LLMs get the bigger the corpus is
The only somewhat realistic proposal in this space is Herb Sutter's cpp2, which is arguably a massive improvement and I'm puzzled why nobody in the standard thought to give it a spin, there's just to much cruft they'll never be able to get rid of unless they make an alternate yet backward compatible syntax with C++ that changes the defaults from "random 80s nonsense" to something better
Cpp2 has been dead for a while afaik, while Carbon is still going.
I don't think Carbon is dead, it just all depends on how easy it actually is to rewrite "all of C++" in Rust. (The jury is still out on this one, but it's not looking good.)
Yes, but at least it was a real thing with a serious proposal behind. Even if Carbon ships, what value would it give in 2029 or whenever it is in a world where writing rust or heck even C++ is now way easier and foolproof (as long as you know where to guide an LLM)
The Carbon team has always been the first one to assert this is for Google internal purpose first and formost, everyone else should go to Rust, Java, Go, C#, Swift,... whatever fits their workloads.
It has been the social media that has given Carbon a roadmap that the team never communicated.
As for Cpp2, it was yet another C++ wannabe replacement, sold as if it wasn't, because the chair of ISO C++ at the time, naturally could not be seen as yet another one coming up with C++ wannabe replacements as well.
tazjin · · focus · HN ↗
Man, I remember back in the days when the cppnext team was refusing to even consider Rust, instead looking at absurd stuff like Carbon and Swift (!), even though half of the engineering staff already knew where this was headed. I hope they got a few good promos out of the delays at least.
timmg · · focus · HN ↗
I was excited to see what it would be. But I don't think I can argue that it makes as much sense anymore.
qalmakka · · focus · HN ↗
The only somewhat realistic proposal in this space is Herb Sutter's cpp2, which is arguably a massive improvement and I'm puzzled why nobody in the standard thought to give it a spin, there's just to much cruft they'll never be able to get rid of unless they make an alternate yet backward compatible syntax with C++ that changes the defaults from "random 80s nonsense" to something better
Mond_ · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think Carbon is dead, it just all depends on how easy it actually is to rewrite "all of C++" in Rust. (The jury is still out on this one, but it's not looking good.)
qalmakka · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
It has been the social media that has given Carbon a roadmap that the team never communicated.
As for Cpp2, it was yet another C++ wannabe replacement, sold as if it wasn't, because the chair of ISO C++ at the time, naturally could not be seen as yet another one coming up with C++ wannabe replacements as well.