Peter Ammon, the leader of the Fish interactive shell development team, has published a plan to translate the project development to Rust. The shell will not be rewritten from scratch, but will be gradually translated module by module from C++ to Rust. According to the Fish developers, using Rust will help solve concurrency issues, provide a more modern and effective error-detection toolkit, enhance memory safety, and eliminate bugs like accessing memory after it's been freed, particularly with strings that use the wchar_t type in Fish.
It is noted that the C++ toolkit is considered outdated by the developers, and there are concerns that continuing to use C++ will exacerbate difficulties in finding new participants for the project. Rust is seen as a more promising and actively developing language with a vibrant and growing community that is already familiar to the current Fish developers and capable of solving the project's existing problems.
During the transition period, coexistence of C++ and Rust code will be managed through FFI (Foreign Function Interface) bindings. Ultimately, in the next major release, the project is planned to be fully transitioned to Rust.
Source: opennet.ru
