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Rust is mostly safety

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Re: Rust is mostly safety

#31

Post by bassislife »

The issue with safety is that nothing is really safe. Once you have some level of safety in your programming language, you realize that there are still a lot of other sources of hazard (hardware errors, programming logic errors etc.)

So I guess, it would be better to say that Rust is about decreasing unsafetyness or whatever the correct word for that is.

edit: since I see posts about Go, this is evidently another approach toward decreasing unsafetyness by providing fewer and easier to understand primitives so that the programming logic is harder to write wrong. It might come at a moderate cost for some applications.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#32

Post by lmm »

geodel wrote: post #20

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.

> Currently Rust is about Go's age but nowhere close in usage.

Citation? I see a lot of people talking about both, but not very many public projects in either. Rust at least has a "killer app" on the way in the form of Servo, whereas I haven't heard of any user-facing programs in Go.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#33

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

robin_reala wrote: post #27
geodel wrote: post #20

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.

It might be Go’s age overall from initial inception, but a typical point at which people start paying attention is the 1.0 release. In Go this was March 2012, for Rust it May 2015, over three years later.

To be honest, Rust took so long to stop making breaking changes and stabilize, I sort of tuned out on it -- it was never at a point it made sense to start using.

Has Rust actually settled down on some stability?

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#34

Post by steveklabnik »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #33
robin_reala wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be Go’s age overall from initial inception, but a typical point at which people start paying attention is the 1.0 release. In Go this was March 2012, for Rust it May 2015, over three years later.

To be honest, Rust took so long to stop making breaking changes and stabilize, I sort of tuned out on it -- it was never at a point it made sense to start using. Has Rust actually settled down on some stability?

A little over 18 months ago, 1.0 was released. We've had very strong compatibility guarantees since then.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#35

Post by izym »

Annatar wrote: post #30

Wow, I have to admit I have never seen anything pushed so aggressively here on Hacker News as Rust. Rust: "everybody who writes in anything but our invention has security holes, but we don't, because we know what we're doing! And although we broke users' programs in the past, we don't do that any more! We're all grown up now! Trust us!"

When have they broken stuff post 1.0?

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#36

Post by marcosdumay »

VexorLoophole wrote: post #19
nothrabannosir wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poi…

> how often "little" things like race conditions break something in production

Often. Way too often. And it always break at 3 in the morning when you are hiking somewhere where there is no internet connection.

Besides, race conditions tend to break on the worst possible ways. It either silently corrupts data, or makes your system stop working but stay active, so the OS does not know it must launch a new instance.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#37

Post by zzzcpan »

bassislife wrote: post #31

The issue with safety is that nothing is really safe. Once you have some level of safety in your programming language, you realize that there are still a lot of other sources of hazard (hardware errors, programming logic errors etc.) So I guess, it would be better to say that Rust is about decreasing unsafetyness or whatever the correct word for that is. edit: since I see posts about Go, this is evidently another app…

True, they messed up in their PR a bit with bold claims about safety. It definitely would be better to be careful with the words they use.

Like this "safe concurrency" claim sounds really fearless to me, even though I know they mean some guarantees towards thread safety and all that, not actual safe concurrency.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#38

Post by fortytw2 »

camus2 wrote: post #28
VexorLoophole wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poi…

> i am always asking myself, how often "little" things like race conditions break something in production It can basically corrupt the whole program. I bet half go apps out there have data race. People who boast about Go's simplicity can't even see the elephant in the room. A simplistic type system doesn't fix unsafe concurrency. You'd think that safe concurrency would be an important design goal for a highly concurr…

In fairness, Go has an extremely good race detector (run/test with -race to enabled it), and makes no guarantees about memory or correctness if you write code with races in it

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#39

Post by stevedonovan »

bassislife wrote: post #31

The issue with safety is that nothing is really safe. Once you have some level of safety in your programming language, you realize that there are still a lot of other sources of hazard (hardware errors, programming logic errors etc.) So I guess, it would be better to say that Rust is about decreasing unsafetyness or whatever the correct word for that is. edit: since I see posts about Go, this is evidently another app…

Exactly. There is always the danger of self-hypnosis, by repeating 'memory safety means safety, full stop' too often.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#40

Post by mafribe »

lmm wrote: post #32
geodel wrote: post #20

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.

> Currently Rust is about Go's age but nowhere close in usage. Citation? I see a lot of people talking about both, but not very many public projects in either. Rust at least has a "killer app" on the way in the form of Servo, whereas I haven't heard of any user-facing programs in Go.

Go is the language in the LXC, Docker, containerisation space.
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