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Is this a Nut?
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this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Sure. I haven't seen a proper segfault from any modern, post-C/C++ language in ages. I've never seen a Go program segfault, or a Nim one (although, there are comparatively few of those as a sample size).
So, it seems to me that - purely from the perspective of a user of programs - Rust still seems about as safe as any other modern language - since I've seen no other modern (say, created in the past decade) compiled language segfault. Even the C segfaults seem to be largely becoming rare occurrences, which I have to chalk up to better tooling, because I highly doubt that there's been some magical increase in general C programmer quality in the intervening years.
Yes, the problems rust is solving are already solved under different constraints. This is not a spicy take.
The world isn't clamoring to turn a go app into rust specifically for the memory safety they both enjoy.
Systems applications are still almost exclusively written in C & C++, and they absolutely do run into memory bugs. All the time. I work with C almost exclusively for my day job (with shell and rust interspersed), and while tried and tested C programs have far fewer memory bugs than when they were first made, that means the bugs you do find are by their nature more painful to diagnose. Eliminating a whole class of problems in-language is absolutely worth the hype.
Go, Java, and Nim (in most cases) are all memory safe but are generally slower than C or C++ due to the ways they achieve memory safety.
Rust's memory safety approach is zero-cost performance wise, which makes it practical for low level, high throughput, and low latency applications.
Everything is slower than C (I haven't seen a benchmark yet where a language bests C; even hand-crafted ASM ceded the high ground decades ago when compilers got better than human assembly programmers), but then, C compiler technology has had literally 40+ years to mature.
Go and Java (once warm) do pretty well, but absolutely give up execution speed for coding simplicity and (in Go's case, anyway) speed. Nim is young; I'm curious to see how it matures. They're having a bit of a performance crisis at the moment, but assuming they get past that it seems like a fair middle ground between Go's simplicity and Rust's bare-metal performance. Then again, manual memory management was absolutely my least favorite thing about C and is what eventually drove me away; worst. Boilerplate. Ever. Even worse than Go's error handling (which they almost fixed and looks like will be addressed within the next free releases). Anyhoo, going back to that shit is going to be a hard pill to swallow.
Rust is still having its honeymoon, and is the hip language of the decade now. We'll see!
Rust is roughly similar to C in most of these benchmarks and beats it in a few: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/rust.html
Arguably when LLVM gets a bit better, Rust can be even faster than C because rust can be optimised in more places safely than C code can. The issue is that LLVM wasn't written with that in mind, so some performance is left on the table.