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It must be super frustrating to be working on and promoting Zig. Zig has a bunch of its own innovative language features. It has amazing cross-compilation. It i
by pornel 4y ago
It must be super frustrating to be working on and promoting Zig. Zig has a bunch of its own innovative language features. It has amazing cross-compilation. It is a major improvement over C that still feels closer in spirit to C than C++.
…but Rust has changed how people view languages. It has brought focus on compile-time safety, and shown it's possible and practical. It has shown that data races can be caught at compile time. It has shown that GC vs manual memory management has a third option.
- suremarc 4y ago> It has shown that GC vs manual memory management has a third option. C++ had shown this long before Rust.
- whimsicalism 4y agoC++, despite RAII, is still manual memory management IMO
- suremarc 4y agoHow is memory management with Vec and Box in Rust any different from std::vector and std::unique_ptr in C++?
- chlorion 4y agoThey aren't :) The main thing I guess is dealing with C APIs in C++. You do have to use C APIs in Rust as well though, but maybe dealing directly with plain C APIs is less common because of how annoying it is. The only way to avoid that pain is to make a Wrapper library that exposes a more idiomatic and possibly "safe" interface. C++ can wrap C APIs just as well though. I agree with you though, C++ has been doing RAII for a while and I'm not sure why people seem to think Rust invented it. Idiomatic C++ APIs and code are just as "automatic" as Rust for the most part!
- tommiegannert 4y agoC++ doesn't have the borrow checker of Rust. Isn't that what made Rust famous? (Your literal question is a straw man: no, those aren't different, but Rust offers more.)
- suremarc 4y agoI don’t really understand what the borrow checker has to do with the automatic/manual memory management dichotomy.
- pornel 4y agoEven though ownership and borrowing are theoretically orthogonal, they're both needed to make a complete safe system (the context was about managing memory for safety, not merely having a syntax sugar for malloc/free.) Unique ownership prevents leaks and double-free, and borrow checking prevents use-after-free. Borrowing is necessary to temporarily relax the exclusivity of uniquely-owned objects and access their interior. Access to interior of a unique_ptr (and shared_ptr) decays it to a reference or a bare pointer that is not managed by the smart pointer any more, and can be left dangling. Borrow checker eliminates the manual "be careful not to leave dangling pointers" part.
- astrange 4y ago> It has shown that GC vs manual memory management has a third option. Objective-C has only existed a few decades now.
- heinrich5991 4y agoNote: Some people consider reference counting to be a form of garbage collection. AFAIK Objective-C has lots of reference counting.
- j-james 4y agoI'd definitely consider it a third option, "garbage collection" to me strongly implies the existence of a "garbage collecter" à la tracing collectors. Reference counting injects reference checks/increments and destructors into the program itself, which means you don't have a separate routine running independently (and nondeterministically) of the main program. The phrase "garbage collection" has also come to be somewhat associated with tracing's specific characteristics (IMO). Manual memory management is performant and deterministic, but unsafe. Tracing garbage collection is performant and safe, but nondeterministic. Reference counting is deterministic and safe, but not as performant. If you throw Rust into the mix as a fourth option I suppose you could add a "flexible" characteristic.
- astrange 4y ago> Reference counting is deterministic and safe, but not as performant. Not as performant in a theoretical model with unlimited memory that all costs the same to access. ie it’s not actually faster in practice when peak memory matters and swap exists.
- astrange 4y agoIt’s deterministic, doesn’t scan memory, and the program only runs the exact instructions you see in its binary instead of stopping and having some part of the runtime appear from nowhere and change things. So… it’s not garbage collection, it’s a dual to it. Rust avoids copies and occasionally proves single ownership instead of having RCs. This seems to me to be overoptimization and a waste of programmer time. Copies are fine and you don’t need to prove them away.
- Gibbon1 4y agoProblem with rust is unlike C you pay for that safety every time you compile.