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Was Rust Worth It?

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Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#181

Post by lmm »

tialaramex wrote: post #167
tantalor wrote: post #19

> I started writing tests in Rust as I would in any other language but found that I was writing tests couldn’t fail. This is a common refrain in C++ testing: if it compiles then it's probably correct. > Rust has accounted for so many errors that many common test cases become irrelevant In practice, if you think this way I think it's a sign that you aren't testing the right things in those other languages. You should…

There is surely something wonderful about the kind of C++ programmer who figures that, since their unusable broken garbage compiled it's probably correct. Remember unlike most languages you'd be familiar with C++ has IFNDR, which has been jokingly referred to as "False positives for the question: Is this a C++ program?". A conforming C++ compiler is forbidden from telling you in some† unknown number of cases that it…

> A conforming C++ compiler is forbidden from telling you in some† unknown number of cases that it suspects what you've written is nonsense, it just has to press on and output... something.

It's not quite that bad - a conforming C++ compiler is permitted to error out and not compile the program. It just doesn't have to.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#182

Post by _aavaa_ »

maxbond wrote: post #163
_aavaa_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the big tech companies are perpetually re-writing their whole stack, or going out of their way to create new compilers for their language in order to lower their billing time.

Salaries are dominant in early stage startups, and infrastructure costs becomes dominant as you scale (also probably a SaaS-centric oversimplification). You can get into trouble in the middle, where you have enough scale to be paying jaw dropping cloud bills, but you don't have the staff to move to a cheaper architecture and you may still need to focus on getting new features out to drive growth (or to attract invest…

I tend to agree with you, but your aside about it being Saas-centric is really important.

One need only open Microsoft Teams to see the “billing time” costs. If the billing time cost is not paid by the developers or their company, then it stop being a cost to them and it becomes an unpriced externality. Who cares, who even knows, that this app we’re writing runs slowly on regular people’s old hardware.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#183

Post by jandrewrogers »

bogwog wrote: post #96
sunshowers wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A full 70% of security vulnerabilities are caused by memory safety issues. As professionals we need to get serious and have memory safety as a baseline requirement.

So we shouldn't use Rust at all, since Rust is not completely memory safe since it let's you disable the borrow checker. We should be serious as professionals and use safe languages like Java, JS, Python, etc. But of course there are use cases where you need memory safety guarantees and bare metal performance. In those cases, sacrificing some memory safety by using Rust is an acceptable tradeoff I think.

Marking code unsafe lets you write memory-safe code that the borrow checker can't verify. That increases the risk of bugs but it is not the same as disabling memory safety. It is a subtle distinction.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#184

Post by jeremyjh »

lolinder wrote: post #115
stcroixx wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl’s CPAN was around in the 90’s and all modules were namespaced.

Fair enough. As I noted to another commenter, I'm not trying to say there was no prior art (if nothing else there was Maven), just that they were following the overwhelming majority of mainstream languages at the time.

> just that they were following the overwhelming majority of mainstream languages at the time.

They were trying to do better than mainstream languages in other areas and succeeded. IIRC on this front they just decided Ruby's bundler was the bee's knees.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#185

Post by lmm »

badrequest wrote: post #161
dilippkumar wrote: post #84

> After two decades of JavaScript and decent experience with Go, this is the most significant source of frustration and friction with Rust. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but you must always be ready to deal with the async monster when it rears its head. In other languages, async is almost invisible. I am a former C and C++ programmer who lived calling into pthread almost every week for a decade. I use async rus…

Recently tried writing some async Rust to compare the error handling when nested async calls are made to how errors are handled in Go, and it seemed like the trivial example I was trying to write up simply couldn't be done without involving Tokio. That barrier simply doesn't exist in Go, or C#, or Typescript. For instance, you apparently cannot `await` in the main function without a decorator you import from, you gue…

You need an async runtime to run async code yes, and Rust's isn't built in. Why does that matter though? Rust has a decent package manager; add the dependency and move on.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#186

Post by HKH2 »

AgentME wrote: post #164
HKH2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give me rusty bash. Bash with types (especially floats), fewer edge cases, functions with explicit parameters, simple command line flags...

You're skipping the most needed improvement of all: fixing the issue where scripts with unquoted variables will seem to work until they contain a space. Almost every single bash script of more than a dozen lines I've seen outside of large open-source projects fails if a user puts a space in a file path, because the programmer didn't understand the insanity of variable quoting rules! I don't know of any programming la…

Shellcheck does cover that. I think the bigger problem is people programming without warnings (in any language).

edit: Although I can see that if they hadn't made string splitting the default, it would have saved a lot of headaches.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#187

Post by jiggawatts »

muldvarp wrote: post #45
jiggawatts wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and all of those have had major security issues caused by their lack of foresight. "We're pretending security is not an issue." has been the feedback every time this is raised with the Cargo team. To be honest, it's turned me off Rust a little bit. The attitude of "Rust is memory-safe, so we don't need any other form of security." is not a good one.

> "We're pretending security is not an issue." has been the feedback every time this is raised with the Cargo team. Do you have a specific link where I can read this response, because this is not at all the responses I have read.

Just some random Cargo security-related issues I noticed:

- No strong link between the repo and the published code.

- Many crates were spammed that were just a wrapper around a popular C/C++ library. There's no indication of this, so... "surprise!"... your compiled app is now more unsafe C/C++ code than Rust.

- Extensive name squatting, to the point that virtual no library uses the obvious name, because someone else got to it first. The aformentioned C/C++ libraries were easy to spit out, so they often grabbed the name before a Rust rewrite could be completed and published. So you now go to Cargo to find a Rust library for 'X' and you instead have to use 'X-rs' because... ha-ha, it's actually a C/C++ package manager with some Rust crates in there also.

- Transitive dependencies aren't shown in the web page.

- No enforcement or indication of safe/unsafe libs, nostd, etc...

- No requirement for MFA, which was a successful attack vector on multiple package managers in the past.

DISCLAIMER: Some of the above may have been resolved since I last looked. Other package managers also do these things (but that's not a good thing).

In my opinion, any package manager that just lets any random person upload "whatever" is outright dangerous and useless to the larger ecosystem of developers in a hurry who don't have the time to vet every single transitive dependency every month.

Package managers need to grow up and start requiring a direct reference to a specific Git commit -- that they store themselves -- and compile from scratch with an instrumented compiler that spits out metadata such as "connects to the Internet, did you know?" or "is actually 99% C++ code, by the way".

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#188

Post by lmm »

ayakang31415 wrote: post #16

I never programmed in Rust, but I had enough experience in C programming to know that segmentation faults are annoying to debug. I heard Rust prevents memory management problems at compilation level, so it forces you to create safer program. Given this, I want to ask Rust programmers here: For people who have no experience in managing memory at coding stage (basically programmer who have no experience in C-like langu…

If you're used to e.g. OCaml, and the problem you're solving does not require avoiding GC, then Rust is a more cumbersome language for no real benefit.

If you've never used an ML family language then Rust might still be a breath of fresh air even if you don't care about memory management.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#189

Post by tialaramex »

maxbond wrote: post #124
Sharlin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A null pointer exception is a bug that breaks business logic. There's no "business logic instead of language stuff" because the language stuff is the foundation that business logic rests on. If you don't test against failure modes, what's even the point in testing?

To close the loop, Rust doesn't include a `null` type and you wouldn't encounter something comparable in idiomatic Rust (because you'd be using eg Option::map to handle None cases gracefully), so this is a class of test that would be common in Java and C that is close to irrelevant in Rust.

To be more specific, Rust does have among other things:

std::ptr::null() - an actual null pointer, probably the zero address on your hardware, and this isn't even an unsafe function. On the other hand, you won't find many uses for a null pointer so, I mean, congrats on obtaining one and good luck with that.

std::ptr::null_mut() - a mutable null pointer, similarly unlikely to be of any use to you in safe Rust, but also not an unsafe thing to ask for.

But, these are pointers, so they're not values that say, a String could take, or a Vec or whatever, only actual raw pointers can be null.

Re: Was Rust Worth It?

#190

Post by _gabe_ »

tialaramex wrote: post #167
tantalor wrote: post #19

> I started writing tests in Rust as I would in any other language but found that I was writing tests couldn’t fail. This is a common refrain in C++ testing: if it compiles then it's probably correct. > Rust has accounted for so many errors that many common test cases become irrelevant In practice, if you think this way I think it's a sign that you aren't testing the right things in those other languages. You should…

There is surely something wonderful about the kind of C++ programmer who figures that, since their unusable broken garbage compiled it's probably correct. Remember unlike most languages you'd be familiar with C++ has IFNDR, which has been jokingly referred to as "False positives for the question: Is this a C++ program?". A conforming C++ compiler is forbidden from telling you in some† unknown number of cases that it…

Can you give an example of non-C++ code that a modern compiler (MSVC, clang, g++ or something) successfully compiles with no diagnostics? I’m genuinely curious. If not, this just sounds like more C++ FUD because the spec doesn’t define everything under the sun and allows a certain amount of leeway to compilers for things like emitting different error diagnostics.
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