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There's two things going on here. 1) We need to move to safer languages 2) Rust is the way, the truth, and the light of safe languages even though its brand n

There's two things going on here. 1) We need to move to safer languages 2) Rust is the way, the truth, and the light of safe languages even though its brand new and barely tested out in production. The first is a defensible position, the second is why people can have a reflexively negative reaction to anybody pushing Rust.

steveklabnik 5y ago
> even though its brand new and barely tested out in production What would get you to change your mind on this? Like, Rust has been heavily tested in serious production for years at this point. 1.0 was six years ago. Where is the bar? How much usage counts? What is no longer "brand new"?
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  1) More time. Rust is what, 6ish years old now? And in those years its continued to evovle and grow. 2) More software. Particularly older software, watching Rust code bases evolve over time. 3) Most topical to this thread, watching how other approaches to safer programming shake out. Its hard to have confidence in a solution to a generic problem when you can only evaluate a single solution. For example I find Zig to be a potentially much better solution since it has a far smaller surface area. Somebody on HN said: Rust is what you get when C++ programmers try and fix memory safety, Zig is what you get when a C programmer tries to do it, and based on the Rust and Zig code I've seen this really rings true. Rust is on a great track, but it seems way way too early to declare victory and start claiming that everybody exploring the same safe programming space is functioning as an unethical professional. EDIT: As an aside I enjoyed your blog post on learning Ada, stream of consciousness and all. You ask what the bar is, the bar is Ada. Decades in the market, formal standard, multiple implementations. I wish somebody would dig into why we need Rust, Zig, or something else when Ada exists. Is it just because Ada syntax is unfamilar to todays programmers or is there something fundamentally unsound about Ada?
  - steveklabnik 5y ago
    All of this is still relative, what is "more"? is it four more years? Ten more years? Twenty? How much software is "more" software? I always find that C++ vs C comparison to be amusing, given I work with a bunch of C folks who don't like C++ but love Rust... not everyone likes languages for the same reasons. There's a grain of truth in sayings like this, but it's not the whole picture. (I am also not saying Rust is the only thing, or that Rust should "win" over Zig, whatever that means, or anything more broadly. My comment is purely about how Rust is too "new" and "untested", in a vacuum.) Thanks for the comment about the blog post. It was a fun one to write.
    - ndesaulniers 5y ago
      > I work with a bunch of C folks who don't like C++ but love Rust There are literally dozens of us!
    - blacktriangle 5y ago
      Something about your Ada post was rubbing me the wrong way, and I figured it out. I'm not trying to be negative or insulting or anything like that, and I'm not trying to make it personal since I think this observation is not limited to you but is endemic in software development, but I don't know a better way to phrase this. The fact that the man who literally wrote the book on what is supposed to be the future of memory safe software engineering is not an expert on the past/current state of the art is deeply concerning. Rust is a large collaborative project that has explicitly avoided having a BDFL, and maybe there are others involved with deeper expertise in the existing state of the art in memory safe languages. Maybe the problem Rust is trying to solve is fundamentally new, but I'm skeptical of that. For all the projects out there that casually look as if they are reinventing the wheel, I wish part of their communication would be to frame themselves in terms of what came before and explain why they are different or why the world has changed or why what came before got something crucial wrong.
      - steveklabnik 5y ago
        Still dodging my questions ;) I think there's a few ways to tease apart what you're saying here. First of all, I think that, even if we take this at face value: > The fact that the man who literally wrote the book on what is supposed to be the future of memory safe software engineering is not an expert on the past/current state of the art is deeply concerning. Not having tons of practical experience with one language is not the same as "not an expert on the past/current state of the art." I am a student of programming language history, I just hadn't spent a ton of time with Ada specifically. There are a lot of programming languages out there, and unless that is your sole focus, you'll miss some. That being said, Graydon is that kind of person, and as far as I can tell, knows everything about every language. While he hasn't been involved in Rust for a while, and Rust looked very different back when he started it, that knowledge was expressly there. > I wish part of their communication would be to frame themselves in terms of what came before and explain why they are different I mean, we have. "memory safety without garbage collection" was our slogan for a very long time. While Ada does have many mitigations here, fundamentally, heap allocation is unchecked, and can cause double-frees or use after frees. SPARK does give you memory saftey, but does this by being an aggressive subset that, as far as I know, doesn't let you use dynamic allocation or pointers at all. But, moreover, it is true that we do not often compare ourselves to other languages directly. This is more of a cultural issue than anything else. Programming languages are very tribal, and even well-meaning comparisons can come across as very aggressive. We don't discourage people making these kinds of comparisons themselves, but as a project, we prefer to talk about what Rust can do, rather than about what other languages can't do. These social reasons blend into technical reasons; programming language cultures that become obsessed with talking about why they're better than others often miss out on the good parts of those other languages. In the end, I think we get better cross-pollination with other languages by not explicitly comparing and contrasting with them in our public-facing marketing. Comparisons, in, say, an RFC are fantastic. These often do get made. But that's internal facing communication, not external.

steveklabnik 5y ago

> even though its brand new and barely tested out in production What would get you to change your mind on this? Like, Rust has been heavily tested in serious production for years at this point. 1.0 was six years ago. Where is the bar? How much usage counts? What is no longer "brand new"?

blacktriangle 5y ago
1) More time. Rust is what, 6ish years old now? And in those years its continued to evovle and grow. 2) More software. Particularly older software, watching Rust code bases evolve over time. 3) Most topical to this thread, watching how other approaches to safer programming shake out. Its hard to have confidence in a solution to a generic problem when you can only evaluate a single solution. For example I find Zig to be a potentially much better solution since it has a far smaller surface area. Somebody on HN said: Rust is what you get when C++ programmers try and fix memory safety, Zig is what you get when a C programmer tries to do it, and based on the Rust and Zig code I've seen this really rings true. Rust is on a great track, but it seems way way too early to declare victory and start claiming that everybody exploring the same safe programming space is functioning as an unethical professional. EDIT: As an aside I enjoyed your blog post on learning Ada, stream of consciousness and all. You ask what the bar is, the bar is Ada. Decades in the market, formal standard, multiple implementations. I wish somebody would dig into why we need Rust, Zig, or something else when Ada exists. Is it just because Ada syntax is unfamilar to todays programmers or is there something fundamentally unsound about Ada?
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  All of this is still relative, what is "more"? is it four more years? Ten more years? Twenty? How much software is "more" software? I always find that C++ vs C comparison to be amusing, given I work with a bunch of C folks who don't like C++ but love Rust... not everyone likes languages for the same reasons. There's a grain of truth in sayings like this, but it's not the whole picture. (I am also not saying Rust is the only thing, or that Rust should "win" over Zig, whatever that means, or anything more broadly. My comment is purely about how Rust is too "new" and "untested", in a vacuum.) Thanks for the comment about the blog post. It was a fun one to write.
  - ndesaulniers 5y ago
    > I work with a bunch of C folks who don't like C++ but love Rust There are literally dozens of us!
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    Something about your Ada post was rubbing me the wrong way, and I figured it out. I'm not trying to be negative or insulting or anything like that, and I'm not trying to make it personal since I think this observation is not limited to you but is endemic in software development, but I don't know a better way to phrase this. The fact that the man who literally wrote the book on what is supposed to be the future of memory safe software engineering is not an expert on the past/current state of the art is deeply concerning. Rust is a large collaborative project that has explicitly avoided having a BDFL, and maybe there are others involved with deeper expertise in the existing state of the art in memory safe languages. Maybe the problem Rust is trying to solve is fundamentally new, but I'm skeptical of that. For all the projects out there that casually look as if they are reinventing the wheel, I wish part of their communication would be to frame themselves in terms of what came before and explain why they are different or why the world has changed or why what came before got something crucial wrong.
    - steveklabnik 5y ago
      Still dodging my questions ;) I think there's a few ways to tease apart what you're saying here. First of all, I think that, even if we take this at face value: > The fact that the man who literally wrote the book on what is supposed to be the future of memory safe software engineering is not an expert on the past/current state of the art is deeply concerning. Not having tons of practical experience with one language is not the same as "not an expert on the past/current state of the art." I am a student of programming language history, I just hadn't spent a ton of time with Ada specifically. There are a lot of programming languages out there, and unless that is your sole focus, you'll miss some. That being said, Graydon is that kind of person, and as far as I can tell, knows everything about every language. While he hasn't been involved in Rust for a while, and Rust looked very different back when he started it, that knowledge was expressly there. > I wish part of their communication would be to frame themselves in terms of what came before and explain why they are different I mean, we have. "memory safety without garbage collection" was our slogan for a very long time. While Ada does have many mitigations here, fundamentally, heap allocation is unchecked, and can cause double-frees or use after frees. SPARK does give you memory saftey, but does this by being an aggressive subset that, as far as I know, doesn't let you use dynamic allocation or pointers at all. But, moreover, it is true that we do not often compare ourselves to other languages directly. This is more of a cultural issue than anything else. Programming languages are very tribal, and even well-meaning comparisons can come across as very aggressive. We don't discourage people making these kinds of comparisons themselves, but as a project, we prefer to talk about what Rust can do, rather than about what other languages can't do. These social reasons blend into technical reasons; programming language cultures that become obsessed with talking about why they're better than others often miss out on the good parts of those other languages. In the end, I think we get better cross-pollination with other languages by not explicitly comparing and contrasting with them in our public-facing marketing. Comparisons, in, say, an RFC are fantastic. These often do get made. But that's internal facing communication, not external.