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Rust is mostly safety

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Re: Rust is mostly safety

#41

Post by quodlibetor »

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.

Docker is go, and afaik has always been.

https://github.com/docker/docker

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#42

Post by Annatar »

izym wrote: post #35
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?

Even once is one time too many.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#45

Post by rkrzr »

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…

> The issue with safety is that nothing is really safe.

There is a trade-off between safety and expressiveness. Clearly you can always shoot yourself in the foot if your language is expressive enough (like any Turing-complete language).

But I think that is beside the point here. This is about eliminating whole classes of errors.

A good type system (e.g Rust's, Haskell's..) can eliminate all type errors from your programs.

A good memory model can eliminate all unsafe memory problems.

There are also languages that can eliminate all data races from your programs.

All these advances in PL theory make it easier and safer to deal with hard problems like concurrency, memory management etc. and thus allow us to focus on what our programs can actually do.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#46

Post by nordsieck »

steveklabnik wrote: post #34
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While that is true, in Go, almost no libraries are written to use non-stable features. This is not the case in Rust.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#48

Post by ChristianBundy »

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.

Docker and Kubernetes are relatively popular, and both are written in Go.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#49

Post by kaoD »

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…

> Rust is about decreasing unsafetyness or whatever the correct word for that is.

I think the word you're looking for is "safety". Safety is inherently relative and mostly about risk management. There's no such thing as 100% safe by definition.

Re: Rust is mostly safety

#50

Post by bassislife »

rkrzr wrote: post #45
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…

> The issue with safety is that nothing is really safe. There is a trade-off between safety and expressiveness. Clearly you can always shoot yourself in the foot if your language is expressive enough (like any Turing-complete language). But I think that is beside the point here. This is about eliminating whole classes of errors. A good type system (e.g Rust's, Haskell's..) can eliminate all type errors from your prog…

> A good type system (e.g Rust's, Haskell's..) can eliminate all type errors from your programs.

It will eliminate errors related to the use of a given programming language. It will not necessarily avoid systemic errors. The programming language is only one part of the problem. Safety is a wider issue than just the use of a programming language.

Especially since the systems we use are often dynamic with changing requirements.

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