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That's interesting but I don't know if it helps with the parents concern. If I arrive into a project, the same reasons that made them choose rust mean that they

That's interesting but I don't know if it helps with the parents concern. If I arrive into a project, the same reasons that made them choose rust mean that they have likely chosen the latest version of rust, with all its complexity and power. If I am inspecting code for safety that is doing low level things then I want to have a clear and simple (imperative) model in my head. I don't want to spend the review admiring how clever the author is. I want to know as directly as possible what is going on in the machine. In another domain the ability for the author to do clever things could make me very productive but it doesn't matter because the safety of low level code is not a concern.

Guvante 6y ago
"Newfangled features" and "don't be too smart for your own good" don't overlap as much as you imply. They aren't entirely orthogonal but very much so. C++'s `unique_ptr` is a "newfangled feature" but is not the latter (ignoring custom delete functionality). I tried to account for the discrediting of zero cost abstractions (which I buy) but I think you are adding the latter onto that which I didn't get from the person I was responding to. > I want to know as directly as possible what is going on in the machine Certainly not in multi-threaded code on an x64 machine (and IIRC ARM is trending in that way as well). There are too many abstractions to actually do that, the best you can do is understand the abstract machine of the language and the rough edges translating that into real machine code entails. > safety of low level code is not a concern I will remind you that in the case of Rust safety is where all of this comes from not productivity. Writing a mutex by hand is hard and you will make mistakes, here is a library construct to do it for you. It will be more complex than what you would write but it will be safer because others have worked with it. etc. etc. When working with minimal computation resources using "works for everyone" constructs stops being zero cost and starts being expensive both conceptually (what were the poisoning rules again?) and performance wise when the cost of providing your abstraction is hard (why can't I arena allocate an RC?) Those are the situations where Rust and even C++ have difficulty shining and C wins out. It provides so little you never have to pay for anything but what you absolutely need. But remember the things you lose out on are from every category you can think of, not just one. Performance, reliability and safety are all often sacrificed in some amount when writing custom code. When you write code instead of a random Joe in a garage you know who to blame when it blows up. When you write code instead of using the larger community code you give up the often great characteristics in every metric for your more fine tuned characteristics in some metric generally. Sorry that got wordy... TL;DR nothing about most low level languages up to things like Java and C# IMO stops you from having a simple imperative model in your head so using that to chose C over something else is missing the point.

Guvante 6y ago

"Newfangled features" and "don't be too smart for your own good" don't overlap as much as you imply. They aren't entirely orthogonal but very much so. C++'s `unique_ptr` is a "newfangled feature" but is not the latter (ignoring custom delete functionality). I tried to account for the discrediting of zero cost abstractions (which I buy) but I think you are adding the latter onto that which I didn't get from the person I was responding to. > I want to know as directly as possible what is going on in the machine Certainly not in multi-threaded code on an x64 machine (and IIRC ARM is trending in that way as well). There are too many abstractions to actually do that, the best you can do is understand the abstract machine of the language and the rough edges translating that into real machine code entails. > safety of low level code is not a concern I will remind you that in the case of Rust safety is where all of this comes from not productivity. Writing a mutex by hand is hard and you will make mistakes, here is a library construct to do it for you. It will be more complex than what you would write but it will be safer because others have worked with it. etc. etc. When working with minimal computation resources using "works for everyone" constructs stops being zero cost and starts being expensive both conceptually (what were the poisoning rules again?) and performance wise when the cost of providing your abstraction is hard (why can't I arena allocate an RC?) Those are the situations where Rust and even C++ have difficulty shining and C wins out. It provides so little you never have to pay for anything but what you absolutely need. But remember the things you lose out on are from every category you can think of, not just one. Performance, reliability and safety are all often sacrificed in some amount when writing custom code. When you write code instead of a random Joe in a garage you know who to blame when it blows up. When you write code instead of using the larger community code you give up the often great characteristics in every metric for your more fine tuned characteristics in some metric generally. Sorry that got wordy... TL;DR nothing about most low level languages up to things like Java and C# IMO stops you from having a simple imperative model in your head so using that to chose C over something else is missing the point.