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Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

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Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#31

Post by ok123456 »

mustache_kimono wrote: post #26
ok123456 wrote: post #9

This pretty much mirrors my experience. Rust is the inverse of Perl: It makes the easy stuff hard. Writing basic data structures isn't a niche, esoteric edge case. There may be a crate that "solves" what you're trying to do. But does it rely on the std---(i.e., is it unusable for systems programming)? Is it implemented making gratuitous copies of data everywhere? Does it have a hideous interface which will then pollu…

> Rust is the inverse of Perl: It makes the easy stuff hard. It's a bargain. Rust is pretty great, but it doesn't make some things easy because it would make everything else hard. This comment is amusing, mostly because Perl is so full of tradeoffs. Do you want to write something to do some string parsing quickly? Great language, maybe. Do you want to understand what you've written later? Maybe not so great. > Writin…

> And I'm not sure anyone loves this attitude either. Keep it technical.

If I didn't include that proviso, I'd have someone arguing with me to the death about how I'm completely wrong and an idiot who doesn't understand the Correct Way of doing things.

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#32

Post by maxbond »

Karellen wrote: post #13

Wait, the benchmark to find the 35th fibonacci number took 1.077s for the Zig VM vs 1.657s for the Rust VM? I realise that these VMs are going to be totally idiomatic Zig/Rust, with the most straightforward implementation possible, and little-to-no performance tuning, but even so - that's gotta be a typo, right? Or it's actually finding `fib(350)`? Or each "run" is actually finding `fib(35)` 100 (1000?) times?

I think the VM is operative here. My native Rust implementation found fib(35) in 51ms, but my Python implementation took about 1500ms (similar to their measurements).

(I eyeballed the assembly to make sure the native implementation was recursive, but that's the extent of my rigor - consider these napkin numbers.)

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#33

Post by rat9988 »

ok123456 wrote: post #31
mustache_kimono wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rust is the inverse of Perl: It makes the easy stuff hard. It's a bargain. Rust is pretty great, but it doesn't make some things easy because it would make everything else hard. This comment is amusing, mostly because Perl is so full of tradeoffs. Do you want to write something to do some string parsing quickly? Great language, maybe. Do you want to understand what you've written later? Maybe not so great. > Writin…

> And I'm not sure anyone loves this attitude either. Keep it technical. If I didn't include that proviso, I'd have someone arguing with me to the death about how I'm completely wrong and an idiot who doesn't understand the Correct Way of doing things.

This is the same as people behaving as jerks claiming that other people are jerks.

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#34

Post by ok123456 »

rat9988 wrote: post #33
ok123456 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I'm not sure anyone loves this attitude either. Keep it technical. If I didn't include that proviso, I'd have someone arguing with me to the death about how I'm completely wrong and an idiot who doesn't understand the Correct Way of doing things.

This is the same as people behaving as jerks claiming that other people are jerks.

It may be "not nice" but it's an accurate and sincere appraisal.

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#35

Post by mjamil »

likeabbas wrote: post #22
bpolverini wrote: post #5

I buy the premise that Zig is better if you know you will have lots of pointer arithmetic going on. Having written a fair amount of unsafe C interop code in Rust, I feel like these critiques of the ergonomics are valid. The new #![feature(strict_provenance)] adds a new layer of complexity, that, I hope, improves some of this experience while adding safety. Rust's benefits are not free. The benefits of Rust's (wonderf…

> I usually find myself wishing I could have some macro where I just write in C and have it exposed as an unsafe back in Rust. There’s a macro for doing this with Assembly, I can imagine one could be made for C. But why wouldn’t you just write unsafe rust at that point?

Perhaps because you want to import something you don’t want to rewrite? There’s a lot of tested C code out there.

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#36

Post by woodruffw »

> Unsafe Rust is hard. A lot harder than C, this is because unsafe Rust has a lot of nuanced rules about undefined behaviour (UB) — thanks to the borrow checker — that make it easy to perniciously break things and introduce bugs.

I don't think this is correct: Rust makes writing unsafe Rust correctly more onerous than writing C, but the actual rules for undefined behavior are the virtually same as in C: if you alias where you must not, or mutate where you must not, etc. you're in exactly the same boat.

In other words: Rust makes it hard to write unsafe Rust correctly, but no harder than writing well-defined C. The only difference is that Rust raises the safety expectations by default, making unsafe Rust look more difficult than C.

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#37

Post by stouset »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #24
ok123456 wrote: post #9

This pretty much mirrors my experience. Rust is the inverse of Perl: It makes the easy stuff hard. Writing basic data structures isn't a niche, esoteric edge case. There may be a crate that "solves" what you're trying to do. But does it rely on the std---(i.e., is it unusable for systems programming)? Is it implemented making gratuitous copies of data everywhere? Does it have a hideous interface which will then pollu…

On top of that Rust might be the ugliest modern language.

People keep saying this and I just do not get it. It's just… not that bad?

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#38

Post by ok123456 »

coliveira wrote: post #29
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of that Rust might be the ugliest modern language.

Agreed, using Rust is like switching a monster (C++) for another even worse. And notice that Rust is not even a mature language, it will get much worse. I will stay with C, thank you.

'constexpr' and 'auto' in modern C++ can eliminate a large portion of the ugliness. In some cases it can be much more ergonomic than the equivalent Rust.

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#40

Post by adamrezich »

eldenring wrote: post #28
ok123456 wrote: post #9

This pretty much mirrors my experience. Rust is the inverse of Perl: It makes the easy stuff hard. Writing basic data structures isn't a niche, esoteric edge case. There may be a crate that "solves" what you're trying to do. But does it rely on the std---(i.e., is it unusable for systems programming)? Is it implemented making gratuitous copies of data everywhere? Does it have a hideous interface which will then pollu…

> Writing basic data structures isn't a niche, esoteric edge case Maybe it isn't an edge case (although it should be) it also isn't `easy` in a non GC'd language, and a huge source of memory bugs. I wouldn't say it makes the 'easy stuff hard' as much as the 'hard stuff appropriately difficult'.

why should writing a basic data structure be an edge case? …what?
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