How I went about learning Rust • Hacker News Board

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#301

Post by stjohnswarts » Tue, Jul 19, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

valbaca wrote: post #294

stjohnswarts wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a new design patterns "book" out and it's pretty nifty as well.

oh! link?

sorry just saw this, I don't check comments but every couple of days https://rust-unofficial.github.io/patterns/ . you probably already found it on google though lol

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#302

Post by augustk » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 3:14 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #229

augustk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, if I'm not mistaken, the language still has no formal specification.

This is a somewhat heretical opinion but I don't think having a formal specification is particularly important for programming languages today. It was very valuable, say, twenty years ago, when there were most programs were written or compiled using multiple closed source implementations of languages coming from competing companies. There were real economic incentives for the implementations to diverge from each othe…

The value of a formal specification is the ability to reason about a program without having to compile and run it (using a specific implementation).

Re: How I went about learning Rust

#303

Post by vistro » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 3:05 PM UTC

augustk wrote: post #302

munificent wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a somewhat heretical opinion but I don't think having a formal specification is particularly important for programming languages today. It was very valuable, say, twenty years ago, when there were most programs were written or compiled using multiple closed source implementations of languages coming from competing companies. There were real economic incentives for the implementations to diverge from each othe…

The value of a formal specification is the ability to reason about a program without having to compile and run it (using a specific implementation).

Good luck reasoning about C++ code. After all static analysis, sanitizers and whatever dynamic analysis, you still cannot be really sure that your code will blow up with undefined behavior.