Comment by greesil

2 months ago

Shitloads of already existing libraries. For example I'm not going to start using it for Arduino-y things until all the peripherals I want have drivers written in Rust.

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greesil

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littlestymaar  2 months ago

Why? You can interact with C libraries from Rust just fine.

  • LtWorf  2 months ago

    But you now have more complexity and no extra safety.

    • dwattttt  2 months ago

      That's not really the case. Not all C APIs are inherently unsafe by construction, and I've always appreciated when someone has wrapped a C library and produced two crates:

      - a pure binding crate, which exposes the C lib libraries API, and

      - a wrapper library that performs some basic improvements

      Stuff in the second category typically includes adding Drop impls to resources that need to be released, translating "accepts pointer + len" into "accepts slices" (or vice versa on return), and "check return value of C call and turn it into a Result, possibly with a stringified error".

      All of those are also good examples of local reasoning about unsafety. If a C API returns a buffer + size, it's unsafe to turn it into a reference/slice. But if you check the function succeeded, you unsafely make the slice/reference, and return it from a safe function. If it crashes, you've either not upheld the C calls preconditions (your fault, check how to call the C function), or the C code has a bug (not your fault, the bug is elsewhere).

    • pornel  2 months ago

      If you create wrappers that provide additional type information, you do get extra safety and nicer interfaces to work with.