Comment by Yoric
1 day ago
> In the limit, smart pointers for everything is just called "Python".
To be more precise, it's old Python. Recent versions of Python use a gc.
> And I am being walked hands handcuffed behind my back, alongside everyone else, into the Rust world with its comparatively anemic proc macro shit because the C++ committee can't be bothered to care about memory safety.
Out of curiosity (as someone working on static analysis), what properties would you like your compiler to check?
To be even more precise:
> Reference counting is the primary mechanism of garbage collection, however, it doesn’t work when the references have cycles between them and for handling such cases it employs the GC.
I've been thinking for a while now about using dependant typing to enforce good numerics in numerics kernels. Wouldn't it be nice if we could propagate value bounds and make catastrophic cancellation a type error?
Have you worked much with SAL and MIDL from Microsoft? Using SAL (an aesthetically hideous but conceptually beautiful macro based gradual typing system for C and C++) overlay guarantees about not only reference safety but also sign comparison restriction, maximum buffer sizes, and so on.
Dependent types in well-behaved, well-defined snippets of C++ dedicated to numeric kernels?
While I think it's a great idea, this also sounds like it would require fairly major rewrites (and possibly specialized libraries?), which suggests that it would be hard to get much buy-in.
Please do this.
But first: we need to take step-zero and introduce a type "r64": a "f64" that is not nan/inf.
Rust has its uint-thats-not-zero - why not the same for floating point numbers??
You can write your "r64" type today. You would need a perma-unstable compiler-only feature to give your type a huge niche where the missing bit patterns would go, but otherwise there's no problem that I can see, so if you don't care about the niche it's just another crate - there is something similar called noisy_float
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> Rust has its uint-thats-not-zero
Why do we need to single out a specific value. It would be way better if we also could use uint-without-5-and-42. What I would wish for is type attributes that really belong to the type.
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