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"Man tries to hammer in screw. Angry at hammer manufactures for not being screwdriver manufactures" ---- I'll just edit this comment to clarify: Rust does a l

"Man tries to hammer in screw. Angry at hammer manufactures for not being screwdriver manufactures" ---- I'll just edit this comment to clarify: Rust does a lot of thing really well. Non-RC manual memory management for a tree/graph structure is absolutely not it. As for the verbose 'unsafe' pointer/memory manipulations, i really don't see the issue. I've written my share and I think its fine to add a roadblock if you want to shoulder the ability to add segfaults and other issues into a codebase. Additionally, it usually helps that you decide to encapsulate it into the least number of unsafe functions, instead of 'doing it manually' all over a codebase.

nyanpasu64 4y ago
Rust is intended to be a systems language capable of replacing C++ in its niche, and interfacing with existing C++ at a fairly coarse-grained level like Firefox's oxidation (though cxx is trying to enable rich interop passing richer types than C-ABI ones), so it's trying to be a better screwdriver more so than a hammer. So difficulty expressing C++ concepts is arguably a flaw, and difficulty implementing all software with the same CPU/memory overhead as C++ (which I'd argue is the case, though some would disagree) is definitely a flaw. It's like creating a new screwdriver bit or handle, trying to convert the world to it, then attracting a legion of followers arguing that manufacturing flat-head screwdrivers should expose you to legal liability for anyone who slips it out of the socket and injures themselves (ignoring that flat-head screws existed and will continue to exist).
Chris_Newton 4y ago
“Left-handed person tries to put screw in with screwdriver shaped for right-handed holding. Right-handed people are surprised when left-handed person decides screwdriver isn’t for them and uses something easier instead.” We saw this for years with C++ and the new-style casts. The principle of making casting behaviours more specific and clarifying the risk of using each of them was fine. In practice, if someone asks programmers to start writing verbose, syntactically awkward stuff like reinterpret_cast<X*>(p) instead of (X*)p and either will work, obviously in the real world many will choose the latter. Empirically, the in-your-face syntax turned out to be a deterrent to adopting the better tools the language offered and so devalued those tools for everyone.
- kibwen 4y ago
  This entire conversation is assuming that `unsafe` in Rust is designed to be syntactic salt to discourage unsafe code, but this is false. The `unsafe` keyword exists to make it easier to understand, review, and audit where memory-safety invariants might ultimately be violated in a zillion-line program, so that instead of needing to carefully consider a zillion lines you only need to consider a tiny fraction of those. It's not there to make programmers' lives harder, it's intended to make programmers' lives easier.

nyanpasu64 4y ago

Rust is intended to be a systems language capable of replacing C++ in its niche, and interfacing with existing C++ at a fairly coarse-grained level like Firefox's oxidation (though cxx is trying to enable rich interop passing richer types than C-ABI ones), so it's trying to be a better screwdriver more so than a hammer. So difficulty expressing C++ concepts is arguably a flaw, and difficulty implementing all software with the same CPU/memory overhead as C++ (which I'd argue is the case, though some would disagree) is definitely a flaw. It's like creating a new screwdriver bit or handle, trying to convert the world to it, then attracting a legion of followers arguing that manufacturing flat-head screwdrivers should expose you to legal liability for anyone who slips it out of the socket and injures themselves (ignoring that flat-head screws existed and will continue to exist).

Chris_Newton 4y ago

“Left-handed person tries to put screw in with screwdriver shaped for right-handed holding. Right-handed people are surprised when left-handed person decides screwdriver isn’t for them and uses something easier instead.” We saw this for years with C++ and the new-style casts. The principle of making casting behaviours more specific and clarifying the risk of using each of them was fine. In practice, if someone asks programmers to start writing verbose, syntactically awkward stuff like reinterpret_cast<X*>(p) instead of (X*)p and either will work, obviously in the real world many will choose the latter. Empirically, the in-your-face syntax turned out to be a deterrent to adopting the better tools the language offered and so devalued those tools for everyone.

kibwen 4y ago
This entire conversation is assuming that `unsafe` in Rust is designed to be syntactic salt to discourage unsafe code, but this is false. The `unsafe` keyword exists to make it easier to understand, review, and audit where memory-safety invariants might ultimately be violated in a zillion-line program, so that instead of needing to carefully consider a zillion lines you only need to consider a tiny fraction of those. It's not there to make programmers' lives harder, it's intended to make programmers' lives easier.