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[BLOG] Why Rust mutexes look like they do - Cliffle
(cliffle.com)
Welcome to the Rust community! This is a place to discuss about the Rust programming language.
Credits
I started playing with rust last week (just converting a couple of C# projects so far), and I'm going to say that once you understand that mutexes/rwlocks are wrappers around the actual data, it (to me at least) feels better.
Don't get me wrong, it's an absolute headache for anyone that's acquired intermediate or better skill in one of the Cx languages. The paradigm shift is still hitting me hard. But this was one of the differences I actually think is an improvement in probably most use cases.
It's a massive win, and I would question the credibility of any systems programmer that doesn't recognize that as soon as they understand the wrapper arrangement. I would have to assume that such people are going around making egregious errors in how they're using mutexes in their C-like code, and are the reason Rust is such an important language to roll out everywhere.
The only time I've ever needed a
Mutex<()>
so far with Rust is when I had to interop with a C library which itself was not thread safe (unprotected use of global variables), so I needed to lock the placeholder mutex each time I called one of the C functions.Exactly. If there's only one thing I could bring from Rust into another language, it would be Mutexes. It's so nice to guarantee safe access to data.
Rust mutexes would be nice. But I think for me that one thing for me would be its enums.
But only if pattern matching were included, otherwise they would be as unpleasant as C++'s
std::variant
.