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I can guarantee you that none of it was written by ChatGPT or any other LLM. As for the Ads, even though it's my site, I'd urge you to turn on adblocker, pi-hole or anything like that, I won't mind. I have ads on there yes, but since I primarily write tech articles for a target audience of tech people you can imagine that most readers have some sort of adblocker either browser, network or otherwise. So my grand total…
The benefit of Zig seems to be that it allows you to keep thinking like a C programmer. That may be great, but to a certain extent it’s also just a question of habit. Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker - their code is already written in a way that just works. Once you’ve been using Rust for a while, you don’t have to “restructure” your code to please the borrow checker, because you’ve a…
The benefit of Zig seems to be that it allows you to keep thinking like a C programmer. That may be great, but to a certain extent it’s also just a question of habit. Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker - their code is already written in a way that just works. Once you’ve been using Rust for a while, you don’t have to “restructure” your code to please the borrow checker, because you’ve a…
I can't remember the last time I had any problem with the borrow checker. The junior solution is .clone(), better one is & (reference) and if you really need you can start to use . There is a mild annoyance with which function consumes what and the LLM era really helped with this. My beef is sometimes with the ways traits are implemented or how AWS implemented Errors for the their library that is just pure madness.
I want to like Zig, but D still exists and feels like everything I want from a C-like alternative to C++ I just wish the rest of the industry had adopted it long ago. Zig has a strange syntax, and Rust is basically eating chunks of the industry, especially in programmer tooling across various languages as is Go (it powers most cloud providers and is the 2nd top choice for AI right after Python).
The benefit of Zig seems to be that it allows you to keep thinking like a C programmer. That may be great, but to a certain extent it’s also just a question of habit. Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker - their code is already written in a way that just works. Once you’ve been using Rust for a while, you don’t have to “restructure” your code to please the borrow checker, because you’ve a…
> Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker My experience is that what makes your statement true, is that _seasoned_ Rust developers just sprinkle `Arc` all over the place, thus effectively switching to automatic garbage collection. Because 1) statically checked memory management is too restrictive for most kinds of non trivial data structures, and 2) the hoops of lifetimes you have to go to t…
If you use Rust for web server backend code then yes, you see `Arc`s everywhere. Otherwise their use is pretty rare, even in large projects. Rust is somewhat unique in that regard, because most Rust code that is written is not really a web backend code.
Actually, developers are idiots. Everyone is. Some just don't know it or won't admit it. I once joined a company with a large C/C++ codebase. There I worked with some genuinely expert developers - people who were undeniably smart and deeply experienced. I'm not exaggerating and mean it. But when I enabled the compiler warnings (which annoyed them) they had disabled and ran a static analyzer over the codebase for the…
The benefit of Zig seems to be that it allows you to keep thinking like a C programmer. That may be great, but to a certain extent it’s also just a question of habit. Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker - their code is already written in a way that just works. Once you’ve been using Rust for a while, you don’t have to “restructure” your code to please the borrow checker, because you’ve a…
I like the fact that "fighting the borrow checker" is an idea from the period when the borrowck only understood purely lexical lifetimes. So you have to fight to explain why the thing you wrote, which is obviously correct, is in fact correct.
That's already ancient history by the time I learned Rust in 2021. But, this idea that Rust will mean "fighting the borrow checker" took off anyway even though the actual thing it's about was solved.
Now for many people it really is a significant adjustment to learn Rust if your background is exclusively say, Python, or C, or Javascript. For me it came very naturally and most people will not have that experience. But even if you're a C programmer who has never had most of this [gestures expansively] before you likely are not often "fighting the borrow checker". That diagnostic saying you can't make a pointer via a spurious mutable reference? Not the borrow checker. The warning about failing to use the result of a function? Not the borrow checker.
Now, "In Rust I had to read all the diagnostics to make my software compile" does sound less heroic than "battling with the borrow checker" but if that's really the situation maybe we need to come up with a braver way to express this.
Why does a personal blog need so many advertising options?
He seems to know what he's doing, from the author's Twitter:
Post something slightly mentioning rust in r/cpp, Rust evangelists show up, post something slightly mentioning rust in r/zig, Rust evangelists show up. How is this not a cult?It's true, but devs are not infallible and that's the point of Rust. Not idiots, not infallible either.
IMO admitting that one can make mistakes even if they don't think they have is a sign of an experienced and trustworthy developer.
It's not that Rust compiler engineers think that devs are idiots, in fact you CAN have footguns in Rust, but one should never use a footgun easily, because that's how you get security vulnerabilities.
I was going to say that it's greatly understating the value of the borrow checker. It guarantees no invalid memory accesses. But then it added: > This means that basically the borrow checker can only catch issues at comptime but it will not fix the underlying issue that is developers misunderstanding memory lifetimes or overcomplicated ownership. The compiler can only enforce the rules you’re trying to follow; it can…
> I don't see why CLI tools are special in any respect. Because they don't grow large or need a multi-person team. CLI tools tend to be one & done. In other words, it's saying "Zig, like C, doesn't scale well. Use something else for larger, longer lived codebases." This really comes across in the article's push that Zig treats you like an adult while Rust is a babysitter. This is not unlike the sentiment for Java bac…
Most of those are more memory safe than C. None of them have the borrow checker. This leaves me wondering why - other than proselytizing Zig - this article would make such a direct and narrow comparison between only Zig and Rust.