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Its worth pointing out because rust has a monopoly on easy-to-write gc-less memory safety, with the alternatives being modern c++ or higher level languages wher

Its worth pointing out because rust has a monopoly on easy-to-write gc-less memory safety, with the alternatives being modern c++ or higher level languages where you run into a garbage collector

tialaramex 4y ago
Even with garbage collection, check the fine print. Most of those languages aren't memory safe when multi-threaded, you can race a complicated data structure so that its state becomes inconsistent and now everything is on fire, so if the garbage collector comes along that just catches fire too.
- moosedev 4y ago
  Do you have any specific examples of this (or the fine print that implies it) for Rust? (Not sealioning[0], genuinely interested!) [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sealioning-internet-trolling#:~:text=Sealioning%20refers%20to%20the%20disingenuous,questions%20of%20the%20other%20commenter https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sealioning-int.... Edit: Just realized you said "even with garbage collection", so you weren't talking about Rust. Never mind.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    That's actually an entirely reasonable question, Rust's memory model is scarcely as well nailed down as the Java Memory Model (which is a GC model that does promise memory safety under concurrency and is worth reading about if you'd like to see how much thought is needed). https://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr133/index.html https://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr133/inde... (section 17.4 of the full specification) However in a sense Rust is cheating. Java has to do a lot of work because they can't stop you writing a data race in Java, so they want that to be safe anyway if it happens. (Safe) Rust just won't emit the data race in the first place. A data race requires (as mentioned below in the thread about Python concurrency) that there's mutation concurrently with access to the same memory. In Java that's a bad idea, but it does happen, usually by mistake. In (Safe) Rust mutation requires that nobody else has a shared (immutable) reference to the object, so the data race can't occur because if we can mutate something by definition nobody else has a reference to it - programs with this mistake won't compile.
    - moosedev 4y ago
      Thank you!

Its worth pointing out because rust has a monopoly on easy-to-write gc-less memory safety, with the alternatives being modern c++ or higher level languages where you run into a garbage collector

tialaramex 4y ago

Even with garbage collection, check the fine print. Most of those languages aren't memory safe when multi-threaded, you can race a complicated data structure so that its state becomes inconsistent and now everything is on fire, so if the garbage collector comes along that just catches fire too.

moosedev 4y ago
Do you have any specific examples of this (or the fine print that implies it) for Rust? (Not sealioning[0], genuinely interested!) [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sealioning-internet-trolling#:~:text=Sealioning%20refers%20to%20the%20disingenuous,questions%20of%20the%20other%20commenter https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sealioning-int.... Edit: Just realized you said "even with garbage collection", so you weren't talking about Rust. Never mind.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  That's actually an entirely reasonable question, Rust's memory model is scarcely as well nailed down as the Java Memory Model (which is a GC model that does promise memory safety under concurrency and is worth reading about if you'd like to see how much thought is needed). https://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr133/index.html https://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr133/inde... (section 17.4 of the full specification) However in a sense Rust is cheating. Java has to do a lot of work because they can't stop you writing a data race in Java, so they want that to be safe anyway if it happens. (Safe) Rust just won't emit the data race in the first place. A data race requires (as mentioned below in the thread about Python concurrency) that there's mutation concurrently with access to the same memory. In Java that's a bad idea, but it does happen, usually by mistake. In (Safe) Rust mutation requires that nobody else has a shared (immutable) reference to the object, so the data race can't occur because if we can mutate something by definition nobody else has a reference to it - programs with this mistake won't compile.
  - moosedev 4y ago
    Thank you!