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0 pointswhytevuhuni7mo ago0 comments

> Why not ATS?

As in, why not use a language with much stronger formal verification? Because people have tried it and failed.

Like you said, Rust is hard, it already feels at the limit of what people can handle.

But unlike ATS, many people have tried Rust and succeeded, and some Rust programmers even claim that they become very productive with it after a while. I very much doubt the same could be said about ATS.

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pron7mo ago· 2 in thread

> But unlike ATS, many people have tried Rust and succeeded, and some Rust programmers even claim that they become very productive with it after a while

So if Rust is preferable to ATS because more people are productive with it despite ATS being able to guarantee more at compile-time, then by that logic a language that more people would be productive with than with Rust, despite Rust guaranteeing more at compile time, would be preferable to Rust.

You see, the problem is that these arguments cannot lead us to an objective preference unless we compared Rust to all other points on the spectrum, especially since Rust proponents already must accept that the best point is not on any extreme. So we know that languages that guarantee more than C but more productive than ATS are preferable. Guess what? Zig is right there, too, so that argument can't be used to prefer Rust over Zig.

whytevuhuniOP7mo ago

Sure, that makes sense. I agree this is all very subjective, given we don't have the benefit of hindsight for what Zig can accomplish yet.

I think where we disagree is that you believe Zig is as safe as Rust (by making it easier to make other things safer). I don't believe so (my first impression of Zig was Bun repeatedly segfaulting), and I'm just sad that people are choosing the easy route and going for more insecure software, when it finally looked like we made such great progress, with a language people can actually use. I agree with simpler, but there's so many other things that can be changed or removed from Rust, and still leave in lifetimes, or something similar.

pron7mo ago

> I think where we disagree is that you believe Zig is as safe as Rust

Quite the opposite. Rust is definitely safer in the simple sense that it guarantees more memory safety. But that's very different from saying that Zig is closer to C than to Rust (Zig's memory safety is much closer to Rust's than to C's), and it also doesn't mean that it's easier to write more correct/secure software in Rust (because there are just too many factors).

> and I'm just sad that people are choosing the easy route and going for more insecure software

The jump from "segfaulting" to "insecure" is unjustified, as not all causes of segfaults map to equally exploitable vulnerabilities. Java programs, for example, segfault much less than Rust programs. Does that mean Rust programs are significantly less secure?

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