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Debugging rare crashes and heisenbugs is more frustrating, and in non-safe languages, a chronic problem. Whereas after you prove the safety of a design once, i

by pshc 3y ago

Debugging rare crashes and heisenbugs is more frustrating, and in non-safe languages, a chronic problem. Whereas after you prove the safety of a design once, it stays with you.

jstx1 3y ago
It stays with you until you need to change something and find yourself unable to make incremental changes. And in many use cases people are throwing Rust (and especially async Rust) on problems solved just fine with GC languages so the safety argument doesn’t apply there.
- brigadier132 3y ago
  > change something and find yourself unable to make incremental changes why do you believe this becomes the case with rust code?
- imtringued 3y ago
  The safety argument is actually the reason why you can use Rust in those cases to begin with. If it was C or C++ you simply couldn't use it for things like webservers due to the safety problems inherent to these languages. So Rust creeps into the part of the market that used to be exclusive to GC languages.
  - maccard 3y ago
    What do you think nginx and Apache are written in?
    - ttfkam 3y ago
      How few severe vulnerabilities and other major defects (memory corruption or crashes) do you think Nginx and Apache have had over the years?
- sliken 3y ago
  Sort of. Do you want someone that doesn't understand the constraints that likely is creating a bug that will cause crashes? Or do you want to block them until they understand the constraints?
throw10920 3y ago
So you use a safe, garbage-collected language like Python, and iterate 5x as fast as Rust. Problem solved. It's 2023 - there are at least a dozen production-quality safe languages.
- buildartefact 3y ago
  You’re seriously suggesting writing a game engine in Python?
  - throw10920 3y ago
    You accidentally responded to the wrong comment. I never mentioned a game engine.
    - Turskarama 3y ago
      It doesn't really matter, there doesn't exist a problem space where both Rust and Python are reasonable choices. Case in point, I once wrote a program to take a 360 degree image and rotate it so that the horizon followed the horizontal line along the middle, and it faced north. I wrote it in python first and running it on a 2k image took on the order of 5 minutes. I rewrote it in rust and it took on the order of 200ms. Could I iterate in Python faster? Yes, but the end result was useless.
      - throw10920 3y ago
        > there doesn't exist a problem space where both Rust and Python are reasonable choices This thread, and many other threads about Rust, are filled with people arguing the exact opposite - that Rust is a good, productive language for high-level application development. I agree with you, there's relatively little overlap - that's what I'm arguing for!
        kprotty 3y ago
        Both qualify for writing tiny web servers, cli/byte-manipulation scripts, server automation jobs, in-house GUI applications, and other small stuff. Could technically argue that these are a "relatively little overlap" depending on what you do though..

by pshc 3y ago

Debugging rare crashes and heisenbugs is more frustrating, and in non-safe languages, a chronic problem. Whereas after you prove the safety of a design once, it stays with you.

jstx1 3y ago

It stays with you until you need to change something and find yourself unable to make incremental changes. And in many use cases people are throwing Rust (and especially async Rust) on problems solved just fine with GC languages so the safety argument doesn’t apply there.

brigadier132 3y ago
> change something and find yourself unable to make incremental changes why do you believe this becomes the case with rust code?
imtringued 3y ago
The safety argument is actually the reason why you can use Rust in those cases to begin with. If it was C or C++ you simply couldn't use it for things like webservers due to the safety problems inherent to these languages. So Rust creeps into the part of the market that used to be exclusive to GC languages.
- maccard 3y ago
  What do you think nginx and Apache are written in?
  - ttfkam 3y ago
    How few severe vulnerabilities and other major defects (memory corruption or crashes) do you think Nginx and Apache have had over the years?
sliken 3y ago
Sort of. Do you want someone that doesn't understand the constraints that likely is creating a bug that will cause crashes? Or do you want to block them until they understand the constraints?

throw10920 3y ago

So you use a safe, garbage-collected language like Python, and iterate 5x as fast as Rust. Problem solved. It's 2023 - there are at least a dozen production-quality safe languages.

buildartefact 3y ago
You’re seriously suggesting writing a game engine in Python?
- throw10920 3y ago
  You accidentally responded to the wrong comment. I never mentioned a game engine.
  - Turskarama 3y ago
    It doesn't really matter, there doesn't exist a problem space where both Rust and Python are reasonable choices. Case in point, I once wrote a program to take a 360 degree image and rotate it so that the horizon followed the horizontal line along the middle, and it faced north. I wrote it in python first and running it on a 2k image took on the order of 5 minutes. I rewrote it in rust and it took on the order of 200ms. Could I iterate in Python faster? Yes, but the end result was useless.
    - throw10920 3y ago
      > there doesn't exist a problem space where both Rust and Python are reasonable choices This thread, and many other threads about Rust, are filled with people arguing the exact opposite - that Rust is a good, productive language for high-level application development. I agree with you, there's relatively little overlap - that's what I'm arguing for!
      - kprotty 3y ago
        Both qualify for writing tiny web servers, cli/byte-manipulation scripts, server automation jobs, in-house GUI applications, and other small stuff. Could technically argue that these are a "relatively little overlap" depending on what you do though..