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> it just defines that safety in a different way than Rust Memory safety is already well-defined, though. It means that you can’t write code that mishandles me

by jolux 5y ago

> it just defines that safety in a different way than Rust Memory safety is already well-defined, though. It means that you can’t write code that mishandles memory in a dangerous way. In Rust, code outside of unsafe blocks is guaranteed to have this property. As far as I know, no such feature exists in Zig. So Zig is starting from a point where it can’t guarantee the safety of any nontrivial program, right?

flumpcakes 5y ago
Can rust _gaurantee_ memory safety? A lot of the core features are built on-top of unsafe {} blocks after all. Zig has it's own memory safe features which will catch a lot of memory safe bugs compared to Vanilla C. asan/valgrind/etc. will also pick up a lot of memory bugs for C and C++. Outside of maybe formal proofs in languages that only exist in research labs there isn't anything that is _provably safe_. This discussion and worship of languages which advertsie themselves as "memory safe" seems a bit zealous and often not useful. I do prefer rust over C++, mainly due to better defaults (immutable variables) and stripping out the object orientated paradigm which just gets abused after 25 years of "enterprise design patterns". After a few years, rust is going to have just as much dodgy software as much established languages. You can see it now with people trying to write in rust as pythonic as possible and littering the place with .unwrap(). That's not a sign of quality/stable software, even if it is written in a 'memory safe' language.
- kvark 5y ago
  Rust proof is coming - https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/610682 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/610682
- jolux 5y ago
  The formal proof doesn’t exist yet but the language was designed from the ground up with memory safety as a key principle. I should note, Rust is not the only safe language. Python is safe, as are most modern languages with garbage collection. Most code can afford a garbage collector and should probably use one. My day job is real-time network + web services with Elixir/Erlang, and it works great. Rust gets brought up in contrast to Zig because it brings the benefits of those higher-level languages down to the metal.

by jolux 5y ago

flumpcakes 5y ago

Can rust _gaurantee_ memory safety? A lot of the core features are built on-top of unsafe {} blocks after all. Zig has it's own memory safe features which will catch a lot of memory safe bugs compared to Vanilla C. asan/valgrind/etc. will also pick up a lot of memory bugs for C and C++. Outside of maybe formal proofs in languages that only exist in research labs there isn't anything that is _provably safe_. This discussion and worship of languages which advertsie themselves as "memory safe" seems a bit zealous and often not useful. I do prefer rust over C++, mainly due to better defaults (immutable variables) and stripping out the object orientated paradigm which just gets abused after 25 years of "enterprise design patterns". After a few years, rust is going to have just as much dodgy software as much established languages. You can see it now with people trying to write in rust as pythonic as possible and littering the place with .unwrap(). That's not a sign of quality/stable software, even if it is written in a 'memory safe' language.

kvark 5y ago
Rust proof is coming - https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/610682 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/610682
jolux 5y ago
The formal proof doesn’t exist yet but the language was designed from the ground up with memory safety as a key principle. I should note, Rust is not the only safe language. Python is safe, as are most modern languages with garbage collection. Most code can afford a garbage collector and should probably use one. My day job is real-time network + web services with Elixir/Erlang, and it works great. Rust gets brought up in contrast to Zig because it brings the benefits of those higher-level languages down to the metal.