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Rust is mostly safety

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Re: Rust is mostly safety

#11

Post by nothrabannosir »

kebolio wrote: post #9

> [Go] failed to provide a safe concurrency model. What did he mean by this?

Go doesn't protect you against race conditions, it merely offers some concurrency tools. There is nothing to declare ownership of objects in memory. So the compiler doesn't (can't) complain if you share memory and access it simultaneously. At best, there are runtime checks. Rust does offer compiler protection against that.

Edit: "merely", relatively to Rust :) on an absolute scale, still way better than C for concurrency.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#12

Post by Ar-Curunir »

koja86 wrote: post #6

In case you missed that there's a big disillusioned C++ crowd out there. Just hear the pain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13276351 And some of them are watching you with great interest.

And there's a tired security crowd watching Rust with great hope; C++ and C have created innumerable security holes at the expense of "convenience". Cryptographic libraries, codec libraries, image conversion libraries, OS kernels, sandboxes, virtual machines, browsers, (the list is endless) have all suffered glaring security holes from the lack of memory hygiene afforded by C and C++.

Any time your code takes in untrusted input, it should not be written in an unsafe language.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#14

Post by cesarb »

steveklabnik wrote: post #4
amelius wrote: post #3

Does Rust have template metaprogramming? And does it look more clean and organized than boost's C++ implementation?

Rust has three main forms of metaprogramming: generics, which are kind of like templates, but more like concepts (in C++ terms), macros, and compiler plugins.

I don't think compiler plugins count yet, since they're currently not stable.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#15

Post by bluejekyll »

steveklabnik wrote: post #2

I'll probably be writing a slightly longer response post to this later, but for now... EDIT: here it is: http://words.steveklabnik.com/fire-mario-not-fire-flowers I think the core of it is this: > Safety in the systems space is Rust's raison d'être. Especially safe concurrency (or as Aaron put it, fearless concurrency). I do not know how else to put it. But you just did! That is, I think "fearless concurrency" is a b…

> I think "fearless concurrency" is a better pitch...

I would go a step further, "fearless programming". Though I would hesitate on 'easy'.

Rust gives you fearlessness in all the things, but it does mean learning new style and discovering new solutions to old problems. To fully understand 'Send' vs. 'Sync', for example, means really groking the Rust type system. Once you get the type system, then fully utilizing it with the expressive generics becomes unlocked, and then at that point you've transcended from Rust dabbler to fully fearless Rust user.

Once this world of development is unlocked to you it is mind-blowing, but it is a journey to get there, and not everyone will have the heart to make it. It comes in stages, is wonderfully rewarding, will make you a better programmer in you other favorite languages, but I think we should be careful with statements like 'Rust makes it easy'.

It does make hard things easy, but only after you've fully embraced Rust. This feels more accurate: "Hey, you know that thing that's really hard for you? Rust makes it fun."

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#16

Post by steveklabnik »

cesarb wrote: post #14
steveklabnik wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust has three main forms of metaprogramming: generics, which are kind of like templates, but more like concepts (in C++ terms), macros, and compiler plugins.

I don't think compiler plugins count yet, since they're currently not stable.

That's an important point, yes, thank you. Their RFC was accepted two weeks ago. We'll see how long they take to make it into stable.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#17

Post by Ar-Curunir »

I think it's a bit funny that in an industry that (supposedly) prides itself on "meritocracy", there are many people that refuse to use (or learn) performant memory-safe languages, when memory-safe code is always better than memory-unsafe code (in terms of resource usage, reduction of bugs, etc, etc.).

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#18

Post by raverbashing »

Rust is great, however the safety aspect gets in the way sometimes

The right granularity for error handling is important, as well as making it easy to handle (abort? providing a default value? doing something else?)

It's not that it is not important, but code usability is important as well, lest it goes on the way of C++ hell (though I don't think it can get that bad, there are some warts - like "methods" and traits)

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#19

Post by VexorLoophole »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #11
kebolio wrote: post #9

> [Go] failed to provide a safe concurrency model. What did he mean by this?

Go doesn't protect you against race conditions, it merely offers some concurrency tools. There is nothing to declare ownership of objects in memory. So the compiler doesn't (can't) complain if you share memory and access it simultaneously. At best, there are runtime checks. Rust does offer compiler protection against that. Edit: "merely", relatively to Rust :) on an absolute scale, still way better than C for concurr…

As a total beginner (learning programming by myself since 2 or 3 years), i am always asking myself, how often "little" things like race conditions break something in production. Sure thing, some applications need to be safe-super-safe. But is it worth to switch over from go to rust as a beginner, since go is the unsafer language? I know, that there is no ultimate language. But i always asked myself i am missing a point, since i never really had problems like that occur. I also wrote something little in clojure (wanted to write something in lisp, and clojure presented itself somehow modern). But many people told me about how bad clojure is, because it is not type-safe. So i switched to go. And i have to say, it is really nice, to be forced to use the right types as input. But will i have the same experience when i switch over to rust and think to myself: "Whoa yes, i never though about that aspect, but it really helps me as a beginner who tends to write slobby programms!"?

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#20

Post by geodel »

The original Rust author make great points about safety. I think this new thrust on marketing emerges from Rust Roadmap 2017 which puts Rust usage in industry as one of the major goal. Currently Rust is about Go's age but nowhere close in usage. As the roadmap says "Production use measures our design success; it's the ultimate reality check." I agree with that.
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