pron

51 ms·

601.
by pron 1y ago
Zig began development ten years after Rust. If we were counting from the beginning of the development rather than 1.0 (as I did above), then Rust is about to turn 20.
602.
by pron 1y ago
Sure, just keep in mind that various formal verification tools vary greatly in their usability, even theorem provers. I.e. the experience with ATS will be quite different from Lean, which will be quite different from TLA+.
603.
by pron 1y ago
> it's not within the scope of a language to prevent such issues As someone working on adding such a feature to Java, I beg to differ. Python has also recently added a language feature to address injection attacks ( https:/&#x2
604.
by pron 1y ago
> But use after free absolutely results in the same kinds of errors (accessing unused memory, or memory used by someone else). That two bugs result in the same or similar outcome doesn't mean they're as common or as equally exp
605.
by pron 1y ago
A specific definition of "popular" doesn't matter. What we can say is that Rust's market share at age 10 is lower than that of Fortran, COBOL, C, C++, VB, Python, JS, Java, C#, PHP, Ruby, TS, Kotlin, and Go at that age,
606.
by pron 1y ago
> Zig doesn't have the memory safety mechanisms of C++ level shared_ptr/unique_ptr. Zig's memory-safety is spatial , which is the more dangerous kind. Your examples are all temporal, and I don't know if I would call
607.
by pron 1y ago
> These two languages were created and pushed by two of the largest corporations on the planet. I don't think Rust lacks in hype and marketing. It doesn't buy ads in print magazines, but no language does anymore (that's ex
608.
by pron 1y ago
> more like newcomers rediscovering the future. I have nothing but admiration for Erlang, and it is, without a doubt, one of the most inspired languages I've encountered in my career. But when I was at university in the late-ish nin
609.
by pron 1y ago
I don't think it's true there was far less choice in 1995. Around that time (a few years later) I was working on a project that was half Ada half C++, and there were a few more exotic choices around. Aside from those, and C, there
610.
by pron 1y ago
> Zig doesn't even pretend to do memory safety This is simply untrue. Zig offers the same spatial memory safety as Rust does, and that is the kind of memory safety that prevents more dangerous vulnerabilities [1] than the kind Rus
611.
by pron 1y ago
> do these languages let programmers explicitly assert that a certain, relevant property holds at runtime? Yes, but the programmer has to do the really, really, really hard work of proving that's the case. Otherwise, the compiler
612.
by pron 1y ago
Not really. With dependent types, you can have a function that returns a type that depends on a runtime value; with Zig's comptime, it can only depend on a compile-time value. Note that a language with dependent types doesn't ac
613.
by pron 1y ago
One of the lessons of the past 50 years in software correctness is that sound guarantees are not always the most effective path to correctness. The problem is that proving something correct takes a lot of effort (and there are fundamental c
614.
by pron 1y ago
> I dunno, I think you're trying to split hairs if top 20 isn't "very popular". It's very popular compared to Prolog or Haskell, but not compared to languages people use professionally: https://www.dev
615.
by pron 1y ago
> There is a very clear sharp line between them in that Rust has no undefined behavior outside of an unsafe block. Yes, but that's an intrinsic language feature whose value needs to be justified somehow. If you justify it by saying
616.
by pron 1y ago
> Not like it's way down the list I'm not saying it's not important, but we do have to consider whether it's worth the cost. > And most of the things the things above it (other than out of bounds writes/reads
617.
by pron 1y ago
> But Zig does not eliminate them, but rather it might catch them at runtime So does Rust. That's what we mean by eliminating them. Zig/Rust will panic, but you won't get a vulnerability. > The difference here is that R
618.
by pron 1y ago
I wasn't programming yet when C was 10 years old, but I was when C++ was 10 years old (1995), and its adoption was an order of magnitude higher than Rust's is today. I agree that of all popular languages, Python is the latest bloo
619.
by pron 1y ago
Rust is much older than Zig, though, and there's nothing stopping Zig (or any future language that doesn't adopt Rust's precise set of guarantees) from having the same, or possibly better. Given Zig's immaturity, I certa
620.
by pron 1y ago
> The underlying issue is that Zig turns out to have no feasible safe subset It does have a safe subset with respect to spatial memory safety, which is the more important kind of memory safety if what we judge by is dangerous vulnerabili
621.
by pron 1y ago
> This is arguable That's not arguable. Because if we say that memory safety is important because it prevents some common and dangerous vulnerabilities, then Zig clearly prevents the most dangerous of those, while C doesn't. &g
622.
by pron 1y ago
> Rust is a very good middle ground: it's a complex language, but there's lot of room for improving its ergonomics. I certainly agree Rust is a much better middle ground than either C or ATS. But so is Zig. What's harder t
623.
by pron 1y ago
> I think where we disagree is that you believe Zig is as safe as Rust Quite the opposite. Rust is definitely safer in the simple sense that it guarantees more memory safety. But that's very different from saying that Zig is closer
624.
by pron 1y ago
> Limiting to the "top 5" vulnerabilities by number of CVEs feels like cherry-picking. The point isn't about limiting to the top 5. The point is that once you get to the things Rust prevents and Zig doesn't, there are
625.
by pron 1y ago
It's actually hard to find any language that has ever very popular (JS, TS, Python, Java, C++, C#, C, and you can even throw in PHP, Ruby, Go, Kotlin, and even COBOL and Fortran) that has such a low adoption rate at age 10. I'm no
626.
by pron 1y ago
> But unlike ATS, many people have tried Rust and succeeded, and some Rust programmers even claim that they become very productive with it after a while So if Rust is preferable to ATS because more people are productive with it despite A
627.
by pron 1y ago
>> Much of Zig seems to me like "wishful thinking"; if every programmer was 150% smarter and more capable, perhaps it would work. ... and the same could be said about Rust, only with Rust we can already see that it suffers f
628.
by pron 1y ago
That falls into "spatial" memory safety, which Zig also provides. Rust's ownership and lifetime - the core of its design - go into eliminating use-after-free, aka "temporal" memory safety.
629.
by pron 1y ago
I agree! Memory safety is important because it's the cause of some of the top vulnerabilities, which is precisely why it's great that both Rust's level of memory safety (which is not absolute) and Zig's level of memory s
630.
by pron 1y ago
This treatment of memory safety is becoming almost a cargo cult at this point. If this were a binary issue, then clearly Rust wouldn't cut it because it is quite common in Rust (much more so than in, say, Java) to rely on unsafe code.

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