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Comment by klodolph

1 day ago

In practice, the validation generally happens when you convert to JSON or use an HTML template or something like that, so it’s not so many places.

Validation is nice but Rust’s principled approach leaves me high and dry sometimes. Maybe Rust will finish figuring out the OsString interface and at that point we can say Rust has “won” the conversation, but it’s not there yet, and it’s been years.

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klodolph

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stouset  1 day ago

> validation generally happens when

Except when it doesn’t and then you have to deal with fucking Cthulhu because everyone thought they could just make incorrect assumptions that aren’t actually enforced anywhere because “oh that never happens”.

That isn’t engineering. It’s programming by coincidence.

> Maybe Rust will finish figuring out the OsString interface

The entire reason OsString is painful to use is because those problems exist and are real. Golang drops them on the floor and forces you pick up the mess on the random day when an unlucky end user loses data. Rust forces you to confront them, as unfortunate as they are. It's painful once, and then the problem is solved for the indefinite future.

Rust also provides OsStrExt if you don’t care about portability, which greatly removes many of these issues.

I don’t know how that’s not ideal: mistakes are hard, but you can opt into better ergonomics if you don’t need the portability. If you end up needing portability later, the compiler will tell you that you can’t use the shortcuts you opted into.

  • maxdamantus  18 hours ago

    Can you give an example of how Go's approach causes people to lose data? This was alluded to in the blog post but they didn't explain anything.

    It seems like there's some confusion in the GGGGGP post, since Go works correctly even if the filename is not valid UTF-8 .. maybe that's why they haven't noticed any issues.