One of the features I love in Rust is very explicit copying. Every potentially expensive copy (clone) is clearly visible and can be easily caught during code review even though a small piece of code has been changed. That is probably one of the biggest advantages of Rust over C++. Nevertheless, more experienced Rust programmers know that it is not always easy to judge if some clone is expensive or not.

Carbon, a new programming language by Google that was announced at CppNorth 2022 conference as part of the presentation “Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++” by Chandler Carruth on July 22nd 2022 (link ). The news spread quickly over the Internet and a few friends reach out to me to ask about my opinion about it and if Rust is going to die because of the appearance of a new baby of a big player in this industry.

I’m a huge Rust enthusiast and you can read more about it in my previous article . Today, I’m gonna show you 2 examples of how Rust can be used together with some existing C and C++ codebases. Rust was designed with its FFI (Foreign Function Interface) in mind so it allows cheap (or even zero cost) interoperability with C and C++. For both solutions (plain C and C++), I’ll demonstrate that we can call C/C++ and Rust code back and forth (pass Rust callback to C++ code).

I love compilers! I cannot code without them. They can prevent entire classes of errors and warns if I accidentally try to do something stupid in the code. Warnings Besides compiling code and checking for type and syntax errors, compilers can also print useful warnings. I’m a fan of turning on all warnings and writing a “paranoidly” safe code just to avoid potential correctness and performance problems. While coding in C/C++, I use to use gcc with flag -Wall.