Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Rust shaped hole

mnvr.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 319 posts

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#171

Post by tialaramex »

klntsky wrote: post #27
slowcache wrote: post #15

Odin has been really growing on me lately as a language that checks all of those boxes. String types, first class allocators, built in tests, a batteries included philosophy, and ease of use are some of the things that really drew me towards it. I really wanted to like rust and I wrote a few different small toy projects in it. At some point knowledge of the language becomes a blocker rather than knowledge the problem…

What's the difference between anti-DIY and "batteries included"?

If Ginger Bill thinks some niche feature might be useful then baking it into Odin is "batteries included" if not, having it would be anti-DIY. This is very much Bill's language. If what you're looking for is that auteur stamp you won't find it in C or Rust or Typescript but you will find it in languages like Jai, Odin, Hare, maybe Zig.

If that creator's vibe happens to match yours this could be beautiful, at least for personal projects. It's hard to imagine this scaling. A triple A studio hiring panel: "You've applied for a job but we write only Jai here. We notice you haven't submitted any obsessive fan art about Jonathan Blow. Maybe talk us through the moment you realised he was right about everything?"

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#172

Post by antonvs »

uecker wrote: post #133
antonvs wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're focusing purely on the problem-fixing aspects, but Rust's expressiveness is why I like it. C can't match that. In C, you're basically acting as a human compiler, writing lots of code that could be generated if you used a more expressive language. Plus, as has been mentioned, it supports refactoring easily and safely better than any language outside of the Haskell/ML space. The advantages of Rust are a package…

I am not criticizing anyone for preferring Rust. I reject the idea that its complexity needs to imposed on everybody because of "safety"

The "impose on everybody" is based on clear, objective metrics at the national and international level.

The fact that you, as an individual, prefer to use an unsafe, weakly typed language isn't very relevant to that.

The issue is not that it's not possible to write secure programs in C, the issue is that in practice, on average, people don't.

Pushing the use of memory-safe languages will reduce the number of security vulnerabilities in the entire software ecosystem.

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#173

Post by n4r9 »

jplusequalt wrote: post #23

>There is an apocryphal story about Euler in elementary school solving all the math problems that the teacher gave to the class in a jiffy, so the teacher tells him to sum up the numbers to a thousand to get him to stop pestering for more. The expectation was that Euler would go through the numbers "imperatively", like C, summing them up. Instead, what Euler did was discover the summation formula and solved it "decla…

Yes, it's Gauss. In fact the technique is sometimes known as "Gaussian summation". The New Scientist has an article where the author chases down early references to the story: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/gausss-day-of-reck...

The earliest reference is a biography of Gauss published a year after his death by a professor at Gauss' own university (Gottingen). The professor claims that the story was "often related in old age with amusement and relish" by Gauss. However, it describes the problem simply as "the summing of an arithmetic series", without mention of specific numbers (like 1-100). Also, it was posed to the entire classroom - presumably as a way to keep them busy for a couple of hours - rather than as an attempt to humiliate a precocious individual.

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#174

Post by delusional »

Expurple wrote: post #162
whytevuhuni wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything I'd like an even lower-level Rust. There's so many good high-level languages to choose from, but when you need to go low-level, there's essentially only C, C++, Rust. Maybe Zig once it reaches 1.0. What we need isn't Rust without the borrow checker. It's C with a borrow checker, and without all the usual footguns.

> There's so many good high-level languages to choose from We have many popular high-level languages, but I disagree that they are good. Most of them are fragile piles of crap unsuitable for writing anything larger than a throwaway script. (In my subjective and biased assessment, which is hovewer based on professional experience)

That's an interesting opinion. Could you mention one that wasn't fragile? Just to get a sense of the shape of these classes.

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#175

Post by dwattttt »

thasso wrote: post #166

A nice thing about C is that you can be pretty confident that you know all major footguns (assuming you spent some time reading about it). With languages that are young or complex there is a much greater chance you’re making a terrible mistake because you’re not aware of it.

I'm yet to see someone be confident in this way on anything more than a trivial program, and be right. Just way too many footguns.

My personal memorable one was bit shifting 32bit values by varying amounts, and our test vectors all failing after a compiler update, because some of the shifts were by 32. Undefined behaviour.

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#176

Post by pjmlp »

Expurple wrote: post #41

> If someone posts a patch or submits a PR to a codebase written in C, it is easier to review than any other mainstream language. There is no spooky at a distance. [..] Changes are local. Lol, wut? What about about race conditions, null pointers indirectly propagated into functions that don't expect null, aliased pointers indirectly propagated into `restrict` functions, and the other non-local UB causes? Sadly, C's e…

The C myth keeps being perpetuated, sadly.

And had not GNU/FSF made C the official main language for FOSS software on their manifesto, by the time when C++ was already the main userspace language across Windows, OS/2, Mac OS, BeOS, that "It is the reason for C's endurance" would be much less than it already is nowadays, where it is mostly UNIX/POSIX, embedded and some OS ABIs.

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#177

Post by saagarjha »

uecker wrote: post #50
tines wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples of Rust and C++ design that are over engineered?

For C++, just take lambda captures, you can do [&], [=], [a], [&a], [a = b] (and I probably forgot half), the many way you can do initialization in C++ became a meme, but it really permeates the whole language whose design is driven by enthusiasts and people who have an interest to make it more complex (trainers, book authors, consultants, etc.) For Rust, I think it is a bit of a different story and it is harder to p…

I think captures are mostly reasonable and fine (and other languages have similar constructs). Initialization is completely broken, yes.

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#178

Post by blub »

tialaramex wrote: post #46
uecker wrote: post #20

It is a bit unclear to me why somebody who rejects C++ because "I once spent an entire year in the heaven of C++, walking around in a glorious daze of std::vector and RAII, before one day snapping out of it and realizing that I was just spawning complexity that is unrelated to the problem at hand." (which I can absolutely agree with!) is picking Rust from all options. If there is a language that can rival C++ in term…

I've seen this idea from a few people and I don't get it at all. Rust is certainly not the simplest language you'll run into, but C++ is incredibly baroque, they're not really comparable on this axis. One difference which is already important and I think will grow only more important over time is that Rust's Editions give it permission to go back and fix things, so it does - where in C++ it's like venturing into a ho…

Because they’re both complicated languages, but for different reasons. Rust didn’t really solve memory safety, it just pushed all the complexity into the type system. If one was struggling with memory errors in C++ that’s nice. If one was using Java, that still sucks.

Furthermore some programmers really like complicated languages like Rust, Haskell, etc others like straightforward languages like Go, Python, etc.

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#179

Post by pjmlp »

whytevuhuni wrote: post #144
Expurple wrote: post #41

> If someone posts a patch or submits a PR to a codebase written in C, it is easier to review than any other mainstream language. There is no spooky at a distance. [..] Changes are local. Lol, wut? What about about race conditions, null pointers indirectly propagated into functions that don't expect null, aliased pointers indirectly propagated into `restrict` functions, and the other non-local UB causes? Sadly, C's e…

If anything I'd like an even lower-level Rust. There's so many good high-level languages to choose from, but when you need to go low-level, there's essentially only C, C++, Rust. Maybe Zig once it reaches 1.0. What we need isn't Rust without the borrow checker. It's C with a borrow checker, and without all the usual footguns.

Modula-2, Object Pascal, Ada,....

Zig is basically Modula-2 in C syntax clothing.

Re: A Rust shaped hole

#180

Post by saagarjha »

freeone3000 wrote: post #59
B4uler5 wrote: post #28

If anyone reads this and like me fears the difficulty and complexity of rust, but still wants a language that is competitive in performance, works for system level programming as well as something more general purpose definitely give Swift a go. Over the last year I’ve started to write every new project using it. On windows, on linux and mac. It is honestly a wonderful language to work with. Its mature, well designed…

My major problem with Swift was its error messaging. “Error: -2.” Okay, well, I suppose I’ll attach a debugger and… it’s of absolutely no help, since it crashes internally to some function and I can’t get out a stacktrace. Function calling is irksome, with implicit parameters and mandatory parameters vaguely mixing? And the typing is appalling - there are multiple bottom types with implicit narrowing casts, one of th…

You should be able to get stack traces in the debugger, what issues did you run into?
Post reply on HN