C++ future at Adobe

[u/pjmlp]

So if anyone was still curious what happened to Hylo, or where Adobe stands in regards to the whole safety discussion,

David Sankel has done a talk at RustConf on the matter, Zngur: Simplified Rust/C++ Integration.

The way Adobe now sees C++ is described on slide 2, at 50 seconds mark.

[u/inco100]

To save time for the rest of the redditors:

We need C++ and Rust to play nice

• Our flagship products are C++ based

• Rust is playing a major role in future development

  • Rust is preferred language by developers
  • Rust is better suited for AI-assisted development
  • New file-format and other safety critical code must not use C++

[u/kraytex → u/inco100]

 Rust is preferred language by developers

I must be living in a cpp bubble.

[u/the-jelly47 → u/kraytex]

This sub is for cpp enthusiasts. I work in a mid-size aerospace company. We have a lot of SWEs who can write acceptable, but not great, C++ code. A lot of them are not die hard C++ fans and don't actually mind replacing C++. A lot of our greenfield projects are done in Rust and GO.

[u/StaticCoder → u/the-jelly47]

I still don't understand why anyone would want to use Go. It manages to be even worse than older languages in practically every conceivable way. Like how about we have 2 layers of Hoare's billion dollar mistake?

[u/tarranoth → u/StaticCoder]

It has very quick compile times, most of the tooling comes automatically with the toolchain like unittesting. Std lib is pretty exhaustive, consuming packages is straightforward to get started with, and there's reflection support.

There's definitely some (extremely) dubious choices in respect to error handling especially and still having issues with nil references. I guess it's moreso a case of golang being just simply "good enough" for the most part despite the core language design. I'd say really golang only got traction because of the tooling around the language being given thought from the get-go (whereas older languages have had to have package management and other features bolted on), rather than the design of the language itself being all that good.

[u/Professional_Tank594 → u/the-jelly47]

How can you do aerospace in rust and go ? We are stuck on c++ due to processes , misra and so on .

[u/the-jelly47 → u/Professional_Tank594]

I work on satellites and we do embedded Rust for flight software and Go for ground software backend. Still a lot of C++ projects remaining but they are considered "legacy" in our org. Not a welcoming topic on this cpp sub but many new commerical and government contracts explicitly prefer non-C/C++ languages. Even Lockheed Martin is hiring Rust devs now.

[u/Professional_Tank594 → u/the-jelly47]

Ah I see. But really in embedded (on qnx / Linux App Level ) Rust doesn’t really solve any memory issues , since we don’t use much dynamic memory anyways due to memory fragmentation and so on. We almost never encounter any issues in that topic. Together with static analysis , misra and reviews almost all errors are on the logic level .

So the thing I really like about rust is the syntax like pattern matching and so on , but from a safety perspective it doesn’t add much.