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0 pointsscoopdewoop9mo ago0 comments

> If we could wave a magic wand and make all code safe with no downsides, who among us wouldn't?

Anybody would, but Rust is not that wand, and there is no wand.

Code needs to _exist_ in order to matter. Time is finite, my free-time is even more limited. Most of my code is garbage collected, and runs great, but if I needed it to be really fast, I would use Zig.

I don't need to be told what software is for or how to accomplish my goals, and I'm sure you wouldn't understand my goals. I've been making code creatively for almost 30 years. You might as well tell an origami artist that folding paper is a bad way to accomplish their goals.

The attitude among _some_ Rust devs (or armchair coders) that there is no place for non-rust manual-memory languages is insanely disconnected with reality. Games exist, Rust ones hardly do. Synths exist, Rust ones hardly do. Not everything is a high-availability microservice or an OS kernel! Look around!

Edited to add:

> "Safety" is just a shorthand for "my program means what I say". Unsafety is semantic gibberish.

You know this isn't true, right? "Safety" in Rust specifically means memory safety and thread safety: no use-after-free, no data races, no null/dangling pointer dereferences, no buffer overflows. That's it. It doesn't guarantee your program is correct, and it doesn't even prevent memory leaks.

Things being manually managed doesn't make them gibberish, and something being implicit, rather than explicit, doesn't mean its gibberish.

The attitude of Rust being bug-free is _insaaaane_. A "bug" is just code that breaks expectations, I promise we can and will write those in every language forever.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

AlotOfReading9mo ago· 1 in thread

I want to be clear here because I think you might have read that as less precisely worded than I intended.

When I say "my program means what I say", that means the code that is written has some precise meaning that can be faithfully translated into execution (sans hardware/runtime/toolchain bugs).

This is different than "I said what I mean". If you write different code, that may violate expectations and create a bug, but it will still be faithfully translated as written.

Safe Rust attempts to guarantee this with the absence of UB. The definition rust uses still isn't a universal definition, which we agree on. That's why my comment didn't actually talk about Rust. The definition I used should be valid no matter what particular guarantees you choose.

    Things being manually managed doesn't make them gibberish, and something being implicit, rather than explicit, doesn't mean its gibberish.

I completely agree. I like C, for what it's worth.

Where we disagree is that I'm saying this doesn't scale. A large enough program (for a surprisingly small definition of large) will always have gaps and mistakes that violate your chosen definition of safety, and those bits are the gibberish I'm talking about.

scoopdewoopOP9mo ago

I understood and considered both things you could have meant. Either way I think you come off as an armchair coder that overstates what rust safety actually is (its not abstract, i enumerated it). You are doing rust a disservice in the most stereotypical way. I have no more time for this, going to go play one of hundred of thousands of gibberish games.

vrmiguel9mo ago

> The attitude of Rust being bug-free is _insaaaane_.

Funny, because that's not anywhere close to what the comment you're replying to states.

They said `"Safety" is just a shorthand for "my program means what I say"`. That's a reasonable explanation: the code you wrote is not working exactly as you intended, due to some sort of unknown behavior.

The "bug" you're talking about would be the program doing exactly what you implemented, but what you implemented is wrong. The difference is so obvious that it's hard to think that you're engaging in a good faith argument.

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