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What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

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Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#2
"Each method is defined on this Context type that carries some common state, and the methods tend to call one another."

This is classically a problem of GUI systems, where you have a large number of interlinked on-screen objects constantly undergoing modification.

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#4
post #3

Yes... but before you start feeling too sure about Rust protecting you from creating bugs, also consider this more cautionary (and very entertaining) tale posted on HN today: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/fuzzing-rust-minidump-for-...

Well you’d have these bugs, plus the memory bugs in other languages.

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#5
post #3

Yes... but before you start feeling too sure about Rust protecting you from creating bugs, also consider this more cautionary (and very entertaining) tale posted on HN today: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/fuzzing-rust-minidump-for-...

You mean the tale of someone rewriting a very complex and fiddly software from scratch, having it work great in production, and then using the ecosystem's great tooling to easily find and eliminate even more bugs than what the language already protected them from?

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#6
post #3

Yes... but before you start feeling too sure about Rust protecting you from creating bugs, also consider this more cautionary (and very entertaining) tale posted on HN today: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/fuzzing-rust-minidump-for-...

This seems like the opposite of a cautionary tale, if anything it makes Rust seem an even better choice.

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#7
post #3

Yes... but before you start feeling too sure about Rust protecting you from creating bugs, also consider this more cautionary (and very entertaining) tale posted on HN today: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/fuzzing-rust-minidump-for-...

> I needed a bit of palette cleanser

This is a fun mistake. It’s “Palate cleanser”.

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#8
This article is super overcomplicated. All it had to say was that rust tells you when you keep reference to on stack variable after it goes out of scope. Context provided adds nothing.

I must say - as someone who doesn't use rust - I haven't had this type of issue in years, and when I did it wasn't hard to debug. You get corrupted data, set data breakpoint and in the provided example you will see it being modified by unrelated operations on stack. From there there is only one conclusion. Authors reactions seems to be a bit exaggerated.

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#9
post #4
post #3

Yes... but before you start feeling too sure about Rust protecting you from creating bugs, also consider this more cautionary (and very entertaining) tale posted on HN today: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/fuzzing-rust-minidump-for-...

Well you’d have these bugs, plus the memory bugs in other languages.

They already did. Hence the rewrite from C++ to Rust.

Re: What it feels like when Rust saves your bacon

#10
post #8

This article is super overcomplicated. All it had to say was that rust tells you when you keep reference to on stack variable after it goes out of scope. Context provided adds nothing. I must say - as someone who doesn't use rust - I haven't had this type of issue in years, and when I did it wasn't hard to debug. You get corrupted data, set data breakpoint and in the provided example you will see it being modified by…

I agree with you on the first point, but I totally disagree with you on the second point: sure if you know how to reliably reproduce an issue it isn't complicated to debug, but this kind of issue can be difficult to reproduce, can create silent issues..
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