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I'm sure there are many Ruby programmers that are competent at low level code, but based on my anecdotal observations, I find the thought of the average Ruby de

• pcwalton 14y ago
  I think it's a lot less terrifying than writing Ruby extensions in C (which has been the main alternative up to now), because Rust is memory-safe. There's a lot less that can go wrong when you can't scribble on freed memory or jump to undefined addresses outside of designated "unsafe { ... }" blocks. Note that the Gaussian blur function is all safe code—the only unsafe code here is the code to marshal the data structures to and from Ruby.
  • voidlogic 14y ago
    "less terrifying than writing Ruby extensions in C" Very true, still terrifying though. I wonder if the reputation of C might not cause a selection bias towards the type of developer that can hack it though. Anyway, this is definitely a solid move.
    • jerf 14y ago
      What, specifically, is horrifying, though? It's not C. It's not C++. It's not ASM. You're not going to accidentally implement a buffer overflow, you're not even going to accidentally stomp on Ruby stuff. You might find the Rust language itself intimidating but I'm not seeing what's scary about the integration itself.
• steveklabnik 14y ago
  I actually wrote the start of a book (it's about 50 pages) specifically on this topic. This kind of thing was something I had on my plate to try, glad someone has already tackled it!