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Very interesting breakdown. Do you think that Rust could instead help outsourcing? Similar to how Java's GC keeps teams away from segfaults, could Rust's safe

Very interesting breakdown. Do you think that Rust could instead help outsourcing? Similar to how Java's GC keeps teams away from segfaults, could Rust's safety guarantees give companies more confidence that an outsourced team's code would have fewer critical bugs?

alxlaz 7y ago
Uh, I don't think I can answer that question objectively. My opinion about outsourcing companies is heavily influenced by the fact that I am from one of those cheap outsourcing destinations, and it's anything but positive. (Edit: to clarify -- I have first-hand experience with outsourcing so yeah. Not positive.) I guess -- but take it with a grain of salt, given what I've said above -- that it's something which shouldn't even play a role in deciding whether to outsource something or not. There are infinitely many ways to introduce critical bugs, and Rust -- any language, in fact -- helps with only a tiny subset of these. It won't help you against misusing crypto primitives, or failing to validate paths, or a bunch of other things. (Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that, if you don't trust a development team to get something done in a language, you shouldn't trust them to get something done in any language. Bugs can happen in any language, and some languages make it easier than others to introduce some types of bugs. But good developers should be able to write good software in any good language, it's not like we're comparing Rust and INTERCAL). Also, Rust is pretty complex, and it attempts to solve a lot of non-trivial problems. In my experience, attempts to handle this kind of complexity by organizations that focus on nothing but price and headcount misfire very, very badly.
zozbot234 7y ago
Java doesn't keep teams away from NullPointerException, ConcurrentModificationException and CrossCastException - Rust does. But then, think of the amount of serious bugs and design flaws that typical Java/.NET outsourced code has, even after the former have been scrubbed away from a codebase. Let's just say that I'm far from optimistic that Rust alone could be the silver bullet that makes outsourcing work.

alxlaz 7y ago

Uh, I don't think I can answer that question objectively. My opinion about outsourcing companies is heavily influenced by the fact that I am from one of those cheap outsourcing destinations, and it's anything but positive. (Edit: to clarify -- I have first-hand experience with outsourcing so yeah. Not positive.) I guess -- but take it with a grain of salt, given what I've said above -- that it's something which shouldn't even play a role in deciding whether to outsource something or not. There are infinitely many ways to introduce critical bugs, and Rust -- any language, in fact -- helps with only a tiny subset of these. It won't help you against misusing crypto primitives, or failing to validate paths, or a bunch of other things. (Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that, if you don't trust a development team to get something done in a language, you shouldn't trust them to get something done in any language. Bugs can happen in any language, and some languages make it easier than others to introduce some types of bugs. But good developers should be able to write good software in any good language, it's not like we're comparing Rust and INTERCAL). Also, Rust is pretty complex, and it attempts to solve a lot of non-trivial problems. In my experience, attempts to handle this kind of complexity by organizations that focus on nothing but price and headcount misfire very, very badly.

zozbot234 7y ago

Java doesn't keep teams away from NullPointerException, ConcurrentModificationException and CrossCastException - Rust does. But then, think of the amount of serious bugs and design flaws that typical Java/.NET outsourced code has, even after the former have been scrubbed away from a codebase. Let's just say that I'm far from optimistic that Rust alone could be the silver bullet that makes outsourcing work.