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RustBelt: securing the foundations of the Rust programming language

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Re: RustBelt: securing the foundations of the Rust programming language

#81

Post by master-litty »

sifoo wrote: post #80
master-litty wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great place to engage in intellectually stimulating conversations. I, among many others, would love to read your objective thoughts about the fundraising choice. Instead you've decided to facetiously label rustaceans as psychotic and mentally ill because they like sharing an upcoming technology. I don't know what reaction you wanted but it won't be a positive one here.

Every C compiler and major C library out there to begin with, given that it's the most important and fundamental language in the real world right now. Did you get it this time? Have you been living under a rock lately, or are you just pulling the oldest trick in the psychopath book; condemning others for reacting to abuse? Sharing and attacking others for not agreeing is not the same thing, I hope we agree so far.

C is fundamental and important now, but are you really not sick of it? Don't you wish we had a language that made it easier and more intuitive to program? Because many of us do. I'm personally rather tired of the boilerplate and legacy issues that come up when writing C -- Seriously, some of them being as simple as writing identical function signatures in multiple files.

It works but we live in a time where we can move on. We don't have to be discontent with an old technology. We have the momentum and community to, who knows, maybe even totally replace C one day.

People are already making games and servers out of Rust. I think that's huge and definitely worthy of further funding and research of all sorts; People are using this technology whether you like it or not!

Did you get it this time?

Anyway, I'm sorry to hear you felt abused for having a differing opinion on a forum somewhere. I understand how emotionally compromising it must be to have your opinions challenged! Hopefully people will treat you with great respect in the future and use C forever.

Re: RustBelt: securing the foundations of the Rust programming language

#82

Post by dawg »

steveklabnik wrote: post #68
dawg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to restrict yourself to betterC to use manual memory management. BetterC is mainly targetted at embedded programming and to port components of existing C applications. Malloc vs. GC vs. stdx-allocator is a separate topic, though betterC doesn't link with the GC by default.

Yes, thanks. Last I checked, you still lose features if you use manual memory management, betterC or no. Has this changed recently?

You loose builtin arrays and hashes and need to use a container library instead. Same goes for newing aggegates which can be replaced with smart pointers. Escaping closures (delegates) no longer works, but you can explicitly capture context in a struct.

Those choices for builtin language features date back to the early inspiration from Java, but are increasingly being replaced with library implementations. We've added escape checking to the type system last year, and are currently working on safe aliasing (preventing use-after-free).

So yes, atm. when opting for @nogc you're somewhat at the frontier, and it's mostly a choice if you have time, hard requirements, or am very practised.

Avoiding most (but not all) GC allocations is already widely adopted in D's community though.

Re: RustBelt: securing the foundations of the Rust programming language

#83

Post by sifoo »

master-litty wrote: post #81
sifoo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every C compiler and major C library out there to begin with, given that it's the most important and fundamental language in the real world right now. Did you get it this time? Have you been living under a rock lately, or are you just pulling the oldest trick in the psychopath book; condemning others for reacting to abuse? Sharing and attacking others for not agreeing is not the same thing, I hope we agree so far.

C is fundamental and important now, but are you really not sick of it? Don't you wish we had a language that made it easier and more intuitive to program? Because many of us do. I'm personally rather tired of the boilerplate and legacy issues that come up when writing C -- Seriously, some of them being as simple as writing identical function signatures in multiple files. It works but we live in a time where we can mo…

No, that's my point; there are thousands of very experienced and dedicated coders out there who are not sick of it; because we've been around long enough to not blame our tools, and we have enough experience to appreciate its unique strengths. I'm all for simpler and more intuitive, but Rust is the opposite of that; it's rigid and complex if anything. Why does everything have to be a competition? Why can't several technologies be allowed to coexist? This is not about having your opinions challenged, you need to work on your reading comprehension; this is about not attacking others for expressing different preferences from your own.

Re: RustBelt: securing the foundations of the Rust programming language

#84

Post by master-litty »

sifoo wrote: post #83
master-litty wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C is fundamental and important now, but are you really not sick of it? Don't you wish we had a language that made it easier and more intuitive to program? Because many of us do. I'm personally rather tired of the boilerplate and legacy issues that come up when writing C -- Seriously, some of them being as simple as writing identical function signatures in multiple files. It works but we live in a time where we can mo…

No, that's my point; there are thousands of very experienced and dedicated coders out there who are not sick of it; because we've been around long enough to not blame our tools, and we have enough experience to appreciate its unique strengths. I'm all for simpler and more intuitive, but Rust is the opposite of that; it's rigid and complex if anything. Why does everything have to be a competition? Why can't several te…

I would alternatively suggest you improve your conveyance of thoughts. It's clear now you have a rationalized and objective view of the situation, but it took us three or four replies to understand your underlying reasoning.

When you start a comment chain by needlessly bashing the users of technology X, and don't really support your opinion of them with anything factual, what are you hoping we read there? It feels like you want us to read between the lines and assume you have a better reason to bash them; That's mindreading, and unfortunately something none of us can do.

I think many Rust advocates, myself included, tend to foresee an eventual obsoletion of C because of theoretical overlapping purpose. We see Rust providing certain development luxuries without the usual heavy performance decrease accompanying them. While we can't say for sure, we think a majority of people will prefer having those luxuries in the future.

The most compelling thought for me is: In a world where Rust had more complete libraries, and most developers knew Rust instead of C, is there an incentive to learn and use C for new projects?

It's a complete matter of opinion but I think it's the reason most rustaceans "hound" on C devs. I don't think there would be such an incentive. I find them equally complex in their own ways, but also find more benefits with Rust versus C.

Re: RustBelt: securing the foundations of the Rust programming language

#85

Post by estebank »

namelost wrote: post #61
pcwalton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most ironic part is that so many restrictions and problems are likely to provoke people to rely on whatever option happens to work, which might not be the best/safest one. Programs written in Rust are empirically safer than programs written in C or C++. > The higher the freedom, the better the results delivered by a sensible/knowledgeable person. If that were true, then C and C++ code would be safer and more se…

> > The most ironic part is that so many restrictions and problems are likely to provoke people to rely on whatever option happens to work, which might not be the best/safest one > Programs written in Rust are empirically safer than programs written in C or C++. But Rust defines safety as being safe from the kinds of errors that the Rust compiler is capable of making one safe from (buffer overflows, race conditions,…

> If one if distracted by trying to satisfy the borrow checker, they might overlook a logical error.

I see it the other way around. I let the compiler deal with the borrow and type checkers and to tell me what I missed, while I focus on the logic of the code.

Re: RustBelt: securing the foundations of the Rust programming language

#86

Post by Jweb_Guru »

namelost wrote: post #61
pcwalton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most ironic part is that so many restrictions and problems are likely to provoke people to rely on whatever option happens to work, which might not be the best/safest one. Programs written in Rust are empirically safer than programs written in C or C++. > The higher the freedom, the better the results delivered by a sensible/knowledgeable person. If that were true, then C and C++ code would be safer and more se…

> > The most ironic part is that so many restrictions and problems are likely to provoke people to rely on whatever option happens to work, which might not be the best/safest one > Programs written in Rust are empirically safer than programs written in C or C++. But Rust defines safety as being safe from the kinds of errors that the Rust compiler is capable of making one safe from (buffer overflows, race conditions,…

> Rust is great for writing high-performance code, or code that needs to be parallelised within a single process. However if performance is not a concern then a statically typed language with a GC is usually a better choice.

Are there Rust programmers who disagree with that?

Re: RustBelt: securing the foundations of the Rust programming language

#87

Post by Jweb_Guru »

sifoo wrote: post #66
bvinc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The higher the freedom, the better the results delivered by a sensible/knowledgeable person. Experience has shown this hypothesis to be false, especially concerning low level systems programming languages and security issues.

Until we have as much code written in Rust as is currently implemented in C, experience hasn't shown anything. The same claims and promises have been made for C++ in relation to vanilla C for ages, and it's just not true. An experienced C coder (which arguably takes longer to achieve) will perform as good as a C++ coder of equal skill level. All they do is trade complexity and convenience for simplicity and flexibili…

This working group literally just proved that a significant subset of Rust is safer than any comparable subset of C++. This isn't a matter of opinion. What more proof do you actually want than a formal proof? I seriously wonder what people think the whole point of this paper was.

Re: RustBelt: securing the foundations of the Rust programming language

#88

Post by dang »

sifoo wrote: post #80
master-litty wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great place to engage in intellectually stimulating conversations. I, among many others, would love to read your objective thoughts about the fundraising choice. Instead you've decided to facetiously label rustaceans as psychotic and mentally ill because they like sharing an upcoming technology. I don't know what reaction you wanted but it won't be a positive one here.

Every C compiler and major C library out there to begin with, given that it's the most important and fundamental language in the real world right now. Did you get it this time? Have you been living under a rock lately, or are you just pulling the oldest trick in the psychopath book; condemning others for reacting to abuse? Sharing and attacking others for not agreeing is not the same thing, I hope we agree so far.

> Have you been living under a rock lately, or are you just pulling the oldest trick in the psychopath book

This is so far outside what's acceptable on HN that I've banned this account. Would you please not create accounts to break the site guidelines with?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: RustBelt: securing the foundations of the Rust programming language

#89

Post by kazagistar »

p0nce wrote: post #76

Every post in this thread slightly criticizing Rust is greyed. This is an unfortunate part of being an overhyped language: no one is allowed to emit discordant opinions.

Alternative take: upvoted comments are about the article content, while greyed out ones are people criticizing the programming language in a way that is tangentially related at best.

Re: RustBelt: securing the foundations of the Rust programming language

#90

Post by vectorEQ »

adding security features to a language itself seems a bit silly. it just adds complexity and bloat to the code (which has been and still is mostly unverified..) which gives people a sense of security that's most likely false (as people imagine hyped things to be bigger than they actually are). I'd say a good coder could write more seucre and sound code in C, though someone who isn't conscious of the nature of the language would write 'safer' code in rust or so. In the end it's better to learn to do things without these training wheels >.> all this hand holding is just making people weak like anything else in life.
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