If you had an ancient utility in assembly that did exactly what you wanted and no particular issues, then it would have been a dubious decision to rewrite in C.
Of course, the relative likelyhood of assembly code actually continuing to function across the evolution of processor instruction sets is lower than C, so the scenario is a bit trickier to show in that example.
However, there are two much more striking examples:
COBOL continues to be used in a lot of applications. Because the COBOL implementations work and while it would be insane to choose COBOL for them now if they were to start today, it’s also insane to rewrite them and incur the risks when they work fine and will continue working.
Similarly, in scientific computing there’s still a good share of Fortran code. Again, an insane choice for a new project, but if the implementation is good, it’s a stupid idea to rewrite.
There’s not a lot of reason to criticisize the technical merits of Rust here, nor even to criticize people for choosing Rust as the path forward on their project. However the culture of ‘every thing must be rewritten in Rust’ is something worthy of criticism.
Chiming in for something unrelated. Fortran is actually pretty cool and if you need to do a lot of number crunching for scientific calculations starting a project in Fortran is not that bad.
I started working on Fortran04 and back then I really couldn’t see any advantage of c++ if we’re talking computations. Now with Fortran23 we’re talking about quite a modern language.
I mean, if you’re considering Fortran for a project your only other likely choice is c++, and I tell you Fortran feels much smoother and easy to work with if you have to do calculations. I guess if you don’t worry about it being new you could consider Julia, but for many applications Fortran still has its well deserved spot.
If you had an ancient utility in assembly that did exactly what you wanted and no particular issues, then it would have been a dubious decision to rewrite in C.
Of course, the relative likelyhood of assembly code actually continuing to function across the evolution of processor instruction sets is lower than C, so the scenario is a bit trickier to show in that example.
However, there are two much more striking examples: COBOL continues to be used in a lot of applications. Because the COBOL implementations work and while it would be insane to choose COBOL for them now if they were to start today, it’s also insane to rewrite them and incur the risks when they work fine and will continue working.
Similarly, in scientific computing there’s still a good share of Fortran code. Again, an insane choice for a new project, but if the implementation is good, it’s a stupid idea to rewrite.
There’s not a lot of reason to criticisize the technical merits of Rust here, nor even to criticize people for choosing Rust as the path forward on their project. However the culture of ‘every thing must be rewritten in Rust’ is something worthy of criticism.
Chiming in for something unrelated. Fortran is actually pretty cool and if you need to do a lot of number crunching for scientific calculations starting a project in Fortran is not that bad. I started working on Fortran04 and back then I really couldn’t see any advantage of c++ if we’re talking computations. Now with Fortran23 we’re talking about quite a modern language.
I mean, if you’re considering Fortran for a project your only other likely choice is c++, and I tell you Fortran feels much smoother and easy to work with if you have to do calculations. I guess if you don’t worry about it being new you could consider Julia, but for many applications Fortran still has its well deserved spot.