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Rust is going to take credibility hits if more people do this. Once it becomes socially acceptable to use unsafe all over the place in the community, it might b

• estebank 7y ago
  I don't think 1) unsafe will ever become prevalent in the ecosystem nor 2) that unsafe should be seen as anything other than an escape hatch that is sometimes necessary. Autotranslations from C will be seen as what they are, a transliteration from a less safe language with exactly the same bugs as the preexisting codebase. You could think of the case of calling a COM library that has a leak or a OOB error, I wouldn't blame the language doing the calling for the bug. Having said that, these translations are still useful as a starting point, not a destination. Think of a case where the external C API is retained, but all the innards are gradually converted to a more idiomatic codebase.
  • namewasmypw 7y ago
    `unsafe` is already very prevalent in the ecosystem and this is a big point of contention. https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/289 https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/289
    • arghwhat 7y ago
      This would be anecdotal, and caused massive stir in the community when it was realized.
      • beatgammit 7y ago
        And a lot of the usages were promptly fixed when people made a stink about it.
        • jturpin 7y ago
          It was only fixed when a fuzzer showed a lot of vulnerabilities. Up until then the attitude was "stop demonizing unsafe, we know what we're doing."
          • cogman10 7y ago
            I don't know about those particular authors. However, the vibe I get from the rust community as a whole is "unsafe is where dragons lay". Most, I'd say, treat it just like inline asm in C++. Sometimes a necessary evil, but not something you should be in the habit of using.
    • nicoburns 7y ago
      Actix is currently popular, but only because the rest of the ecosystem has been waiting for `async-await`, and taking a slow-and-steady approach to getting things right. I'd expect Actix's popularity to take a dramatic downturn right about when Rocket releases a async version that runs on stable Rust.
  • weberc2 7y ago
    > these translations are still useful as a starting point, not a destination. This was the case for the Go compiler (automatic translation from C to Go), and it has worked out well in practice. There are still some vestiges, but it's moving more and more toward idiomatic Go all the time.
    • skainswoo 7y ago
      Yeah, this is the broad goal of the project. As much as I love fresh rewrites, I don't think they have nearly the same hope of becoming successful as this sort of gradual approach. It's a big project, and there's lots of code that's still not idiomatic by any means, but the goal is to get 1% better every day.
  • tom_mellior 7y ago
    > Autotranslations from C will be seen as what they are, a transliteration from a less safe language with exactly the same bugs as the preexisting codebase. Yes. But I agree with the parent that there is a credibility problem here. The featured repository calls itself a fork "written entirely in Rust" (emphasis mine). It doesn't call itself "autotranslated to Rust". There would be enough room for that in the title, but the author decided to spend that room on calling it "free-range, non-GMO" instead. It doesn't acknowledge the point you raise, that this is apparently much closer to a starting point than to the destination. The README is somewhat circumspect about the fact that this is autotranslated. It does mention c2rust, but doesn't actually say anything about the status of a conversion to safe, idiomatic Rust. There is a long list of commits which suggest that the author did a lot of manual fixes, so something was done beyond just autotranslation, but it's hard to judge. So I think the credibility danger is that if HN were to get more frequent "X written in Rust" that would turn out to just be "X autotranslated to Rust", at some point the community might tire of upvoting these, and other "X actually written in Rust" submissions might get buried. Or similarly, instead of a general "it's feasible and useful to rewrite X in Rust" impression, the wider community (somewhat open to Rust but not diehard fans) might get an impression of "even Rust fans are too lazy to actually rewrite stuff in safe Rust".
    • wtetzner 7y ago
      But doesn't "fork" imply that it's not actually a re-write or a clone?
• Matthias247 7y ago
  > Rust is going to take credibility hits if more people do this I disagree on that. Rust also took a credibility hit for people advertising exactly the opposite: To rewrite things from scratch. While that approach certainly helps with getting idiomatic code right from the start, years of feature development will get lost, and the chances for introducing non memory related bugs are still there. The ability to transfer a project to Rust in 1 step, and then to gradually improve it seems like a big plus to me. Of course it would not be great if projects are just auto-translated and then kept that way. But I don't think that is the intention of most authors who do that.