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I guess one of the things that always comes to mind when someone brings up "Rust all the things" is that it assumes that anything that can be expressed in C can

I guess one of the things that always comes to mind when someone brings up "Rust all the things" is that it assumes that anything that can be expressed in C can be expressed in Rust with the safety features enabled. Rust wouldn't have a mechanism to do unsafe code otherwise, right? I think it might be more complicated than we might think initially. I personally think that someone should probably spend some more time on GC that's performant enough for systems code. My convictions haven't driven me to do anything about it, however.

Retra 9y ago
Safe rust clearly cannot express everything that can be expressed in C. It cannot even express everything that is safe in general. But "the safety features of Rust" includes drawing a barrier between the safe parts of your code and the unsafe parts. There is significant value in that compartmentalization. Moreover, you are assuming that things written unsafely in C should be written identically in rust, when there very well could be more idiomatic, modern ways to do the same thing without any unsafety at all.
- youdontknowtho 9y ago
  There are modern ways to express something safely that is written unsafely in C. What Rust evangelists seem to forget is that there have been ways to do that for a long time. The article actually has very little safe Rust in it. It makes me wonder what we are gaining? If the idea is that introducing Rust means that later you can go back and add type and memory safety...why not use C++ in a type and safe by construction way? Why not use Safe D? I'm personally just looking forward to the hype dying down. I'm tired of hearing about it, and most of the time I just click "hide" on Rust articles because I'm not interested and people are starting to sound pretty shrill.
  - Retra 9y ago
    Have you ever written anything in Rust?
    - youdontknowtho 9y ago
      Like I said, I'm tired of hearing about it and, no, I haven't.

Retra 9y ago

Safe rust clearly cannot express everything that can be expressed in C. It cannot even express everything that is safe in general. But "the safety features of Rust" includes drawing a barrier between the safe parts of your code and the unsafe parts. There is significant value in that compartmentalization. Moreover, you are assuming that things written unsafely in C should be written identically in rust, when there very well could be more idiomatic, modern ways to do the same thing without any unsafety at all.

youdontknowtho 9y ago
There are modern ways to express something safely that is written unsafely in C. What Rust evangelists seem to forget is that there have been ways to do that for a long time. The article actually has very little safe Rust in it. It makes me wonder what we are gaining? If the idea is that introducing Rust means that later you can go back and add type and memory safety...why not use C++ in a type and safe by construction way? Why not use Safe D? I'm personally just looking forward to the hype dying down. I'm tired of hearing about it, and most of the time I just click "hide" on Rust articles because I'm not interested and people are starting to sound pretty shrill.
- Retra 9y ago
  Have you ever written anything in Rust?
  - youdontknowtho 9y ago
    Like I said, I'm tired of hearing about it and, no, I haven't.