carbon-lang VS crubit

The roadmap for Carbon [0] mentions wanting to have basic, non-trivial programs written in Carbon by the end of 2024. They're aiming for a v0.1 release in 2025. If it gains traction, they're aiming for a v1.0 beyond 2027.

I don't think anyone outside Google will seriously adopt this before it reaches v1.0. Even within Google, they may choose other options.

[0] - https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/do...

Carbon was started by Chandler Carruth, at Google, but they wanted to move it to broader governance quickly. It's not under the Google GitHub today, but its own org.

https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/do...

What do you think about Carbon[1]? I am hopeful.

[1] https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang

https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/do...

next year 0.1 will be usable, 1.0 is about 3 years away, sigh, back to my rust fight

1. Carbon

See also:

Thomas Neumann's current proposal for memory safe C++ using dependency tracking:

- https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p27...

Google's proposal for memory safety using Rust-like lifetime analysis:

- https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-lifetime-annotations-for-c/...

- https://github.com/google/crubit/tree/main/lifetime_analysis

For the people who are curious: crubit is an attempt to develop the way to seamlessly integrate C++ and Rust.

Please see the experimentation and proposals at https://github.com/google/crubit/blob/main/docs/lifetime_annotations_cpp.md and https://github.com/google/crubit/blob/main/docs/lifetimes_static_analysis.md

autocxx is good, though crubit is aiming for direct bidirectional interop

The areas you mentioned (CLI, web services, low level systems programming) are not mutually exclusive. Doing a good job on one doesn't mean something else is affected.

The folks who worked on the most popular command line argument parser (https://docs.rs/clap/latest/clap/#example) made a positive contribution that didn't detract from any other use case.

Similarly, the folks working on improving Rust for web services will also make it better for systems programming. In a blog post published today (https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2022/07/27/keyword-ge...), they discuss keyword generics, a feature that will be equally helpful for `async` code and `const` functions evaluated at compile time.

There is already some interoperability with C++ (http://cxx.rs) and ongoing research into automating this interoperability (https://github.com/google/autocxx, https://github.com/google/crubit). Feels like there's enough effort

This language was started by folks at Google. (Although it's interesting that they're publishing it under a separate github org, which suggests ambitions beyond Google's needs.) Google has a huge, performance-sensitive C++ codebase. At Google, major product teams' backends are typically written in C++, as well as common infrastructure like D (disk server), Colossus (distributed filesystem), Spanner (distributed SQL database), and Borg (cluster management). More than a few people would love for it all to be be written in Rust instead, but migration would be challenging, to say the least. I'm told people are looking into it—see Crubit for example. But AFAIK, no one's decided yet whether Google will stay with C++ for all these things, migrate some to Rust, migrate some to Carbon, and/or do something else entirely.

It's currently unclear if Rust can interop with C++ with high fidelity. For example https://docs.rs/moveit/latest/moveit/ and https://github.com/google/crubit/blob/main/rs_bindings_from_... provide functionality to use non-trivially relocatable C++ types from Rust.