5 ms·

The way I think about rust is this: you can experience the pain up front while you’re getting your program to compile, or you can experience pain later during r

• t43562 1y ago
  It's fair enough but if one isn't writing multi-threaded code or code with some complicated ownership scheme then that upfront investment may never really deliver a return.
  • binarymax 1y ago
    Not true. Whole classes of bugs are just eliminated - most importantly NPEs. I’ve seen tiny scripts in node that crash due to lack of an exception handler, and I’ve witnessed countless runtime errors in Java in the simplest of web services.
    • t43562 1y ago
      I've written utility programs that never bother to deallocate memory because the program needs all of it until the point where it exits anyhow.
      • estebank 1y ago
        You can do the same in Rust with Box::leak, which takes an owned pointer and gives you back a 'static borrow. The only caveat is that unless you reconstitute the type its Drop impl won't be called, but that's likely exactly what you wanted.
  • acdha 1y ago
    That’s certainly possible but I think it’s increasingly untrue for all but the smallest programs. The problem is that it’s hard to appreciate how many times your program didn’t crash but would have if you’d used a different language. You don’t need to be very complex before you have the risk of something crashing due to an edge case around values which are almost never null, even in languages like Python.
    • t43562 1y ago
      My productivity level in C is medium. In rust I'm competely blocked because I want to create a global variable and absolutely none of the described ways in the docs or stackoverflow work for my example. Should I give up on this "bad idea".....well I cannot because I can't accept not understanding why this is not working when people say it can. Compared to C the situation is outlandishly, even hellishly impossible to understand. If I can't understand this one thing then I feel there's no point in continuing so I must stay and battle it till I get it or give up completely. I don't think I've ever hit anything like this in any other language I've ever learned.
      • AnyTimeTraveler 1y ago
        Have you thought about just not making the variable global and instead adding it as a parameter to the functions that actually need it? You can also create a struct, put your "global" variable inside it and then put all the functions that need the variable into an Impl block of that struct. If you then add the parameter `&self` to these functions, you can access the "global"variable any time via `self.global_variable`. If that is not enough, then you can always make an actual global variable by first wrapping it in a Mutex, to prevent simultaneous access and then wrapping that in an Arc for Atomic Reference Counting. That allows you to pass "copies" of that variable around anywhere, satisfying the borrow-checker (since the variable is now reference-counted in a thread-safe way). If you need a lot of parallel reading, replacing the Mutex with an RwLock is a good idea, since it allows locking from multiple threads, if you want to read it in most cases.
      • rstuart4133 1y ago
        You've said "I want to create a global variable and absolutely none of the described ways in the docs or stackoverflow work for my example" a few times now, and I still have no idea what you are stuck on. Global variables are much the same in C and Rust, as ownership problems largely disappear for global variables. Maybe if you provided the example, someone might provide an insight. I hate to suggest this - but have you asked an AI? They've seen a lot of code. If you give an AI enough context it will likely cough up examples of how others have solved it.
  • estebank 1y ago
    The counterpoint I'd have for this argument is that code that isn't multithreaded or with complicated ownership scheme ends up being very simple looking Rust, so the difficulty of the language doesn't come into play.