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> But the stream of very angry developers with a bone to pick about 'safety' is new. /me looks around for the Boogeyman... Not seeing it. I'm not angry, but I

> But the stream of very angry developers with a bone to pick about 'safety' is new. /me looks around for the Boogeyman... Not seeing it. I'm not angry, but I guess I do have some emotions when I use critical software, written in C by devs who claim they can write perfect C, and I get segfaults. > Many of its features and promises have been done in other languages Also, no, despite often being repeated by those insisting Rust is pure hype, this is not meaningfully true (of course the sentence structure allows for any language having a less impactful subset to qualify). I suspect you'd list them otherwise. I'll give you Ada, but again, not sure that's really salient to the point I'm making.

c_crank 3y ago
Ada, and Cyclone, and Misra C, and various other C formalization tools. It also borrows a lot of the ML stuff from... ML. Engineers who had safety as their prime goal can and often did use Ada and other tools to achieve that goal. The average Rust developer does not seem to be concerned with safety as a goal for the product specification, but rather as some kind of thematic justification divorced from the actual engineering. edit: the bogeyman you mention are the developers who flamed Actix, and who make posts saying that unsafe blocks rely on a social contract.
- sanxiyn 3y ago
  Cyclone is garbage collected. Yes, Cyclone is probably the single biggest influence on Rust. No, but Rust had to introduce theoretical novelties on top of Cyclone. (Rust was very reluctant to do "research", considering its job to be productizing existing research, but it was forced to research anyway, because nothing existing worked.)
- predictabl3 3y ago
  Actix was chalk full of not just unnecessary, but showably unsound usages of unsafe. And then resisted fixing it, and then after another review months later was found to still contain such deficits. Which, ironically, would have been even worse, written with the same level of care, in C.
  - c_crank 3y ago
    "This Haskell program was chalk full of not just unnecessary, but showably unsound uses of UnsafePerformIO..." The language lets people write code that way if they wish. Why are Rust people so aggressive about that?
    - predictabl3 3y ago
      Who? Aggressive about what? Do you get this offended when someone points out obvious bugs and security holes in your C code? What do you expect to happen? The community of people who care about safe systems programming to go "oh yeah it's totally fine that a growing library is full of unnecessary and buggy uses of a language feature"? Take a step back, yeesh. You're just flailing now, and I think I'm going to let you do that by yourself.
      - c_crank 3y ago
        >Who? Aggressive about what? Rust 'community' (subreddit?) members, sending nasty messages to the Actix developer. It was pretty clear the Actix developer was interested in making a fast, dependable web server that was especially good on benchmarks. If the community was so incensed that he did not follow the idiomatic safety standards (that are a language feature rather than a requirement of use), they had a perfectly easy tool to solve the issue: forking the project, to make a Safe-Actix. Naturally, they did not do this, because most of them are more interested in this idea of 'safety' rather than good software. I don't get paid to write any C code, and I don't have much interest in benchmarking, myself, but if I did, I would also be annoyed if I had to deal with nasty comments or worse by a bunch of internet randos insisting I follow a vague standard that makes them feel important.

c_crank 3y ago

Ada, and Cyclone, and Misra C, and various other C formalization tools. It also borrows a lot of the ML stuff from... ML. Engineers who had safety as their prime goal can and often did use Ada and other tools to achieve that goal. The average Rust developer does not seem to be concerned with safety as a goal for the product specification, but rather as some kind of thematic justification divorced from the actual engineering. edit: the bogeyman you mention are the developers who flamed Actix, and who make posts saying that unsafe blocks rely on a social contract.

sanxiyn 3y ago
Cyclone is garbage collected. Yes, Cyclone is probably the single biggest influence on Rust. No, but Rust had to introduce theoretical novelties on top of Cyclone. (Rust was very reluctant to do "research", considering its job to be productizing existing research, but it was forced to research anyway, because nothing existing worked.)
predictabl3 3y ago
Actix was chalk full of not just unnecessary, but showably unsound usages of unsafe. And then resisted fixing it, and then after another review months later was found to still contain such deficits. Which, ironically, would have been even worse, written with the same level of care, in C.
- c_crank 3y ago
  "This Haskell program was chalk full of not just unnecessary, but showably unsound uses of UnsafePerformIO..." The language lets people write code that way if they wish. Why are Rust people so aggressive about that?
  - predictabl3 3y ago
    Who? Aggressive about what? Do you get this offended when someone points out obvious bugs and security holes in your C code? What do you expect to happen? The community of people who care about safe systems programming to go "oh yeah it's totally fine that a growing library is full of unnecessary and buggy uses of a language feature"? Take a step back, yeesh. You're just flailing now, and I think I'm going to let you do that by yourself.
    - c_crank 3y ago
      >Who? Aggressive about what? Rust 'community' (subreddit?) members, sending nasty messages to the Actix developer. It was pretty clear the Actix developer was interested in making a fast, dependable web server that was especially good on benchmarks. If the community was so incensed that he did not follow the idiomatic safety standards (that are a language feature rather than a requirement of use), they had a perfectly easy tool to solve the issue: forking the project, to make a Safe-Actix. Naturally, they did not do this, because most of them are more interested in this idea of 'safety' rather than good software. I don't get paid to write any C code, and I don't have much interest in benchmarking, myself, but if I did, I would also be annoyed if I had to deal with nasty comments or worse by a bunch of internet randos insisting I follow a vague standard that makes them feel important.