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Comment by IshKebab

1 day ago

If it wasn't clear, I have to debug Rust code waaaay less than C, for two reasons:

1. Memory safety - these can be some of the worst bugs to debug in C because they often break sane invariants that you use for debugging. Often they break the debugger entirely! A classic example is forgetting to return a value from a non-void function. That can trash your stack and end up causing all sorts of impossible behaviours in totally different parts of the code. Not fun to debug!

2. Stronger type system - you get an "if it compiles it works" kind of experience (as in Haskell). Obviously that isn't always the case, but I can sometimes write several hundred lines of Rust and once it's compiling it works first time. I've had to suppress my natural "oh I must have forgotten to save everything or maybe incremental builds are broken or something" instinct when this happens.

Net result is that I spend at least 10x less time in a debugger with Rust than I do with C.