Comment by c_crank

3 years ago

[flagged]

> But the stream of very angry developers with a bone to pick about 'safety' is new.

/me looks around for the Boogeyman... Not seeing it. I'm not angry, but I guess I do have some emotions when I use critical software, written in C by devs who claim they can write perfect C, and I get segfaults.

> Many of its features and promises have been done in other languages

Also, no, despite often being repeated by those insisting Rust is pure hype, this is not meaningfully true (of course the sentence structure allows for any language having a less impactful subset to qualify). I suspect you'd list them otherwise. I'll give you Ada, but again, not sure that's really salient to the point I'm making.

  • Ada, and Cyclone, and Misra C, and various other C formalization tools. It also borrows a lot of the ML stuff from... ML.

    Engineers who had safety as their prime goal can and often did use Ada and other tools to achieve that goal. The average Rust developer does not seem to be concerned with safety as a goal for the product specification, but rather as some kind of thematic justification divorced from the actual engineering.

    edit: the bogeyman you mention are the developers who flamed Actix, and who make posts saying that unsafe blocks rely on a social contract.

    • Cyclone is garbage collected.

      Yes, Cyclone is probably the single biggest influence on Rust. No, but Rust had to introduce theoretical novelties on top of Cyclone. (Rust was very reluctant to do "research", considering its job to be productizing existing research, but it was forced to research anyway, because nothing existing worked.)

    • Actix was chalk full of not just unnecessary, but showably unsound usages of unsafe. And then resisted fixing it, and then after another review months later was found to still contain such deficits.

      Which, ironically, would have been even worse, written with the same level of care, in C.

      3 replies →