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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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not a big fan of rust personally. I think it would be much smarter to bring borrow checking to C through annotations. That way we would not have to rewrite the whole world
While I agree that would solve much of the motivation behind rewriting in rust, I don't think it would bring many of the rust-enthusiasts over to C. For me at least, the killer feature of rust is having a modern tooling and language with proper library management, functional stuff in the language and one language standard everyone agrees upon.
I don't think it's about bringing rust enthusiasts to C, it's about the fastest way to bring more safety to the entire ecosystem.
I'm not convinced it's possible with just annotations, mind.
It is possible, it would bring in quite a few restrictions though. The bigger problem I see is that it wouldn't be entirely clear as an end user whether a program is memory safe or not. However, this isn't the case with rust neither. Maybe some kind of certification would help
Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with coding in rust for people who like it. But I do think it's quite a bit of useless work that could be spent more wisely on new products instead of rewriting things that we already have
No C program is written to satisfy a borrow checker and most wouldn't compile with one, so adding it would require rewriting the world anyways. At that point why not choose a language that, in addition to being memory safe, also drastically cuts down on other kinds of UB, has sum types, sane error handling, a (mostly) thread safe standard library, etc.?
I don't think you would get much traction on C developers' existing projects. C gives you the option to do everything your way. If the developer's paradigm doesn't agree with the borrow checker, it could become a rewrite anyway.
Most projects don't use the newer c standards. The language just doesn't change much, and C devs like that. This might get a better response from the modern C++ crowd, but then you are missing a large chunk of the world.
I struggle to learn rust because the semantics and syntax are just so awful. I would love to be enthusiastic about rust, since every seems to love it, but I can't get over that hurdle. Backporting the features into C, or even just making a transpiler from C to rust that uses annotations would be great for me. But the rust community really does not seem interested in making stepping stones from other languages to rust.
I learned a bit of rust and I think it's just about getting used to it. It's fairly subjective, and people say the same about C++. I also prefer the C syntax because I find it's simplicity extremely elegant and prefer it to have fewer features. And I like it for it's consistency, on linux the FHS is based up on C, and it just somewhat feels ugly to break that consistency.
But I also acknowledge the advantages of rust.
I've personally become pretty fond of the syntax and incorporation of FP features. In all fairness though, I haven't written much C or C++ for the last two decades.
Rust incorporates some of my favorite features from FP with handy green thread ergonomics. I'm not a fan of Go, so this gives me a great option for microservices when I can avoid Node.js.
C++ already has much more of the required language constructs, which is why there is already an attempt to add borrow checking to C++ called circle. Until that standardizes, I wouldn't expect it in C.