What does Rust offer over modern C++ with smart pointers and RAII?
Why Rust is a great choice for startups
41–50 of 294 posts
Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's 70% of CVEs, not 70% of all bugs, which is a massive difference. Most programmers don't deal with CVE worthy bugs on a daily basis, no matter what programming language they use.
It's fact that it's easiest to cause a CVE bug in a language that you manually manage memory. So it's true that most likely JavaScript programmers may not cause them too often ;)
Anectodal, but: I had been working on a mixed C/C++ code base which grew over around 20 years to about 1mloc, with a team of programmers varying between 5 and 20, and we had to deal with memory corruption issues around once or twice a year, and those could be solved relatively quickly (even more quickly with modern memory debugging tools like the memory debugger/profiler in Visual Studio).
At the same time, the bug database for the project had a "throughput" of about 5..10 bugs per day (for the programming team, many more for the entire team). The amount of memory related bugs relative to "regular" bugs is infinitesimal even in a C/C++ code base.
Of course I realize that the code base had "sleeper bugs" that hadn't showed up yet, and a memory safe language would have helped to prevent those. But I just wanted to point out that memory corruption issues are just not a daily topic in most C/C++ projects.
In the end, safety comes down to the sandbox your code runs in (for instance operating system processes, or Javascript VMs). Should those sandboxes be written in Rust? Most likely yes. Should everything else be written in Rust? Nah...
Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups
#43I started my first Rust project a month ago after working for years in Golang and before that Python (and before that Perl, C/C++ and Turbo Pascal). I really like the whole experience but I'm not sure if I'd recommend writing all your backend code in Rust as a startup. Rust definitely provides a pleasant experience and is very powerful. If you can stick to the standard library I think Rust is great, though the packag…
Two things I consider:
1. what languages does the team already know best?
2. are any languages dominant in the problem space?
for us, I've used Python over 10 years and Python is the leader in data science / analytics. Some things might be a little faster if we used Rust, but compute is cheap. Go with what you know.
Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups
#44What about Nim?
An in-progress full-stack framework for Nim: https://github.com/jfilby/nexus
Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups
#45> But you really don’t need much more engineer time than using another language, and you get the lower overhead when you actually run your program.
That seems like an extraordinary claim to me. That would imply that when picking something like Django, Rails or Spring over Rust, there's no difference in engineer time taken to add a new feature.
Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups
#46>(...) despite my experience and best intentions, I was in fact making mistakes with C. Subtle leaks, use-after-free,(...) Rust made it very clear that I was not the programmer I thought I was. This really resonated with me. I feel a lot more confident writing code in Rust than say in C or Java. However, in my opinion, it also comes with a downside: These days, whenever I use a 'more forgiving' programming language I…
I still find this type of comment odd (although I do also recognise that it's very common). I write a lot of code in C++. And I'm definitely no fan of it, so I'm not here to defend it! And I write a lot of bugs in that code. But very few of them are segfaults. With smart pointers and some common sense, they're just not that big of a concern. Yes, they do happen, but it's far a minority of the bugs. Maybe everyone jus…
> But very few of them are segfaults. With smart pointers and some common sense, they're just not that big of a concern.
I think it's really a POV thing. Rust surfaces those concerns very directly, even if it would have been correct 99.999999% of the time, Rust will enforce another decile of correctness. Since it does this quite aggressively Rust's users tend to have their mind (mine included) a bit (over)fixated on those issues.
(also, in Rust you don't use common sense, you use the compiler, and imo that's great, my common sense has failed me enough)
Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups
#47What does Rust offer over modern C++ with smart pointers and RAII?
Rustian Safety
Rustian Garbage collection
Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups
#48>(...) despite my experience and best intentions, I was in fact making mistakes with C. Subtle leaks, use-after-free,(...) Rust made it very clear that I was not the programmer I thought I was. This really resonated with me. I feel a lot more confident writing code in Rust than say in C or Java. However, in my opinion, it also comes with a downside: These days, whenever I use a 'more forgiving' programming language I…
I understand the comparison with C (the memory management) but I wonder how do you compare Rust to Java? What is it that makes you feel more confident in Rust compared to Java?
Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups
#49I guess it works for a fully remote company, as you have a large pool of possible candidates. But in my area, I'd say it would be easiest to recruit using java. Next python or node/js, but still a vastly smaller group compared to java devs.
Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still find this type of comment odd (although I do also recognise that it's very common). I write a lot of code in C++. And I'm definitely no fan of it, so I'm not here to defend it! And I write a lot of bugs in that code. But very few of them are segfaults. With smart pointers and some common sense, they're just not that big of a concern. Yes, they do happen, but it's far a minority of the bugs. Maybe everyone jus…
It's not that big issue https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...
Both you and parent are correct. Memory safety issues in c++ code are common, but very often they don't manifest as segfaults. Malloc assertion failures or occasional data corruption in edge cases or "impossible" behavior are more typical symptoms.