3 ms·

Do you mean fewer bugs, or less severe bugs (or some other non-count metric other than severity)?

• chrismorgan 8y ago
  I expect my experience is much the same as Steve’s on this point. Mostly I would say fewer bugs; the bugs that are avoided vary in severity. Many, probably most, are the severe but obvious bugs where you would have hit the first time you tried running the code in another language, but which are instead now caught by the compiler—that’s why “time to first run” is not a reasonable metric for comparing writing code in such languages, but “time to first meaningfully successful run”! But it’s also common for Rust to catch and prevent far more insidious bugs; especially, in my experience, in two areas: firstly, with respect to ownership—things like passing data structures around and improperly mutating them where you should have cloned it instead, which is structurally impossible in Rust (disregarding things like Rc<RwLock<T>>, which make it possible, but make the intent very much clearer); and secondly, where enums (tagged unions) can be used, due to the greater and more precise expressivity. I have much greater confidence that my first pass at a piece of code will work correctly in Rust, once it compiles, than I do in JavaScript—and I’ve been working in JavaScript a lot more than Rust in the last couple of years, yet it’s still true.
  • steveklabnik 8y ago
    Yes, this is exactly what I mean.