5 ms·

I was wondering why the author would think me, the reader, might get very angry about something he wrote, but then I saw this from the creator of Zig: I see a

I was wondering why the author would think me, the reader, might get very angry about something he wrote, but then I saw this from the creator of Zig: I see a lot of toxic Rust vs Zig discourse on Twitter right now... https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1568679389113757698 https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1568679389113757698 There seem to be a lot of heated passions about C replacement languages right now. The Zig v Rust issue seems to boil down to the Rust community putting a lot of effort into making memory safety a priority for everyone in the industry and don't think new languages should backslide into C's "unsaftey"

bigbillheck 4y ago
It wasn't helped by Ziglang's VP of Community Loris Cro using the term 'full-time safety coomer'.
- wchar_t 4y ago
  He apologized: https://twitter.com/croloris/status/1568704125826748416 https://twitter.com/croloris/status/1568704125826748416
  - cyber_kinetist 4y ago
    I think the problem was after he apologized, he should have just stayed quiet online for a few days (for Twitter to let some steam off) but failed to do so. Maybe it's a bit hard for someone who has a very "online" job to be offline for some time. (Vice President... of Community? Is this an official job title related to the Zig Software Foundation?)
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Come on, that was funny.
turminal 4y ago
> the Rust community putting a lot of effort into making memory safety a priority for everyone in the industry It would help if they did that in a manner that resembled harrassment a bit less. I realize most of the community means well but by now it should really be clear that they picked the wrong way.
- staticassertion 4y ago
  Never seen this.
  - adamdusty 4y ago
    Rust community harassment? Must have missed when rust developers harassed the maintainer of actix so bad he quit and temporarily deleted the project repo. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908
    - lifthrasiir 4y ago
      An unfortunate incident, but was that repeated? To my knowledge the community has significantly calmed down after that incident, exactly because it was an unprecedented drama and many agreed that the drama is bad.
    - staticassertion 4y ago
      Nope, didn't miss that, have been a part of rust since 2014. I don't consider any of that harassment at all, let alone harassment with regards to other languages. I'm not going to reshash the discussion as this happened years ago, geofft summarizes things pretty well in that thread, but this has all been discussed to death anyways. And, again, that's still not an example of Rust users "harassing" anyone for using other languages.
verdagon 4y ago
I suspect a lot of the toxic discourse originally comes from folks not understanding each other's use cases and priorities. For some, memory safety is a means to an end: delivering value. In this perspective, one must weigh the benefits of improving memory safety against the complexity costs of proving memory safety. In some situations, the improvement is too small and the added complexity is too much. Some apps and some embedded situations come to mind. Languages like Odin and Zig can be stellar in these situations. For others, memory safety is a responsibility, and upholding it is a basic requirement of modern software no matter what costs we need to pay for it, and if the world would just accept that, then we as a society could move past the days of rampant vulnerabilities and odd memory bugs. Both sides are equally compelling, to me at least. What I hope people can learn is that it really depends on the situation. There is a place and time for both approaches. Once we can accept that, I think the toxicity will dissipate.
- staticassertion 4y ago
  This is exactly the way I see it. I view the bar for developer responsibility to be much higher than some others do. I suspect it's because I come from the world of information security where we deal very directly with the consequences of not having a higher bar. To me, the idea that a new language would be anything other than entirely memory safe, unless it is very domain specific to areas where that's not important, is just another example of developers lowering the bar. And I'm fine calling that out and being called a zealot or whatever.
  - verdagon 4y ago
    You didn't explicitly say this, but for anyone who might misinterpret your comment to imply that any memory-unsafe should be specifically targeted at certain small domains: A vast swath of the programming world doesn't need the level of memory safety that Rust has: apps and webapps are generally sandboxed and only talk to a trusted first-party domain, and games don't need memory safety if they're single player, or even multiplayer co-op against AI. There are a lot of aspects of the industry like this. We do need memory safety in any case that receives untrusted input (for security reasons), cases that handle multiple users' data (for privacy reasons), and safety critical software. There are plenty more cases like these too. Languages like Rust (or even more memory-safe languages) are a stellar choice for this side of the programming world, but not necessarily the other side. Creating simple languages to serve the purposes best served by simple languages is a good thing, and I celebrate and applaud Odin and Zig for that. It's up to the individual developer to make a responsible choice based on their situation, and any developer that uses the wrong language for the wrong situation is indeed guilty of lowering the bar.

bigbillheck 4y ago

It wasn't helped by Ziglang's VP of Community Loris Cro using the term 'full-time safety coomer'.

wchar_t 4y ago
He apologized: https://twitter.com/croloris/status/1568704125826748416 https://twitter.com/croloris/status/1568704125826748416
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  I think the problem was after he apologized, he should have just stayed quiet online for a few days (for Twitter to let some steam off) but failed to do so. Maybe it's a bit hard for someone who has a very "online" job to be offline for some time. (Vice President... of Community? Is this an official job title related to the Zig Software Foundation?)
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Come on, that was funny.

turminal 4y ago

> the Rust community putting a lot of effort into making memory safety a priority for everyone in the industry It would help if they did that in a manner that resembled harrassment a bit less. I realize most of the community means well but by now it should really be clear that they picked the wrong way.

staticassertion 4y ago
Never seen this.
- adamdusty 4y ago
  Rust community harassment? Must have missed when rust developers harassed the maintainer of actix so bad he quit and temporarily deleted the project repo. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22073908
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    An unfortunate incident, but was that repeated? To my knowledge the community has significantly calmed down after that incident, exactly because it was an unprecedented drama and many agreed that the drama is bad.
  - staticassertion 4y ago
    Nope, didn't miss that, have been a part of rust since 2014. I don't consider any of that harassment at all, let alone harassment with regards to other languages. I'm not going to reshash the discussion as this happened years ago, geofft summarizes things pretty well in that thread, but this has all been discussed to death anyways. And, again, that's still not an example of Rust users "harassing" anyone for using other languages.

verdagon 4y ago

I suspect a lot of the toxic discourse originally comes from folks not understanding each other's use cases and priorities. For some, memory safety is a means to an end: delivering value. In this perspective, one must weigh the benefits of improving memory safety against the complexity costs of proving memory safety. In some situations, the improvement is too small and the added complexity is too much. Some apps and some embedded situations come to mind. Languages like Odin and Zig can be stellar in these situations. For others, memory safety is a responsibility, and upholding it is a basic requirement of modern software no matter what costs we need to pay for it, and if the world would just accept that, then we as a society could move past the days of rampant vulnerabilities and odd memory bugs. Both sides are equally compelling, to me at least. What I hope people can learn is that it really depends on the situation. There is a place and time for both approaches. Once we can accept that, I think the toxicity will dissipate.

staticassertion 4y ago
This is exactly the way I see it. I view the bar for developer responsibility to be much higher than some others do. I suspect it's because I come from the world of information security where we deal very directly with the consequences of not having a higher bar. To me, the idea that a new language would be anything other than entirely memory safe, unless it is very domain specific to areas where that's not important, is just another example of developers lowering the bar. And I'm fine calling that out and being called a zealot or whatever.
- verdagon 4y ago
  You didn't explicitly say this, but for anyone who might misinterpret your comment to imply that any memory-unsafe should be specifically targeted at certain small domains: A vast swath of the programming world doesn't need the level of memory safety that Rust has: apps and webapps are generally sandboxed and only talk to a trusted first-party domain, and games don't need memory safety if they're single player, or even multiplayer co-op against AI. There are a lot of aspects of the industry like this. We do need memory safety in any case that receives untrusted input (for security reasons), cases that handle multiple users' data (for privacy reasons), and safety critical software. There are plenty more cases like these too. Languages like Rust (or even more memory-safe languages) are a stellar choice for this side of the programming world, but not necessarily the other side. Creating simple languages to serve the purposes best served by simple languages is a good thing, and I celebrate and applaud Odin and Zig for that. It's up to the individual developer to make a responsible choice based on their situation, and any developer that uses the wrong language for the wrong situation is indeed guilty of lowering the bar.