"Rust's compiler prevents common bugs" So does skill. No offense to you, but, this trope is getting so tiresome. If you like the language then go ahead and use it. What is it with the rust crowd that they have to come acrosslike people trying to convert your religion at your front door?
In summary: use rust.
I don't agree with /u/red-crayon-scribbles ' approach to memory safety, but what you're saying isn't entirely true either.
It is possible to manipulate memory in ways that do not conform to Rust's lifecycle/ownership model. In theory, this can even be done correctly.
The problem is that in practice, this leads to the following, many of which were committed by some of the most highly skilled C developers alive, including major kernel contributors:
...echoing statements expressed by hundreds of thousands of programmers who use the only language where 90% of the world's memory safety vulnerabilities have occurred in the last 50 years, and whose projects are 20 times more likely to have security vulnerabilities.
ooof.
Your first point is not true. There are valid uses of memory sharing that rust will reject.
Curious what you are talking about. Multi-threaded sharing of memory for example is also easy with rust, it just doesn't let you wrote and read at the same time, and so on.
Off the top of my head, single-threaded writing to the same memory from different fields of a struct. Not to mention self-referencing like if you want to hold a buffer and have different views into it in the same structure.
This so true, every one complaining that the borrow checker is annoying isn't apparently aware what they used to do was inherently flawed. Sure there a some, though rare, false positives. But they are easily mitigated. These people are exactly that what they themselves are complaining about, elitist.
Yeah. Once you get used to the (verbose, but by no means unergonomic!) syntax, you'll probably never be happy with another language again. Job-wise, I am currently mostly using Go, and while also a nice language, I miss the confidence and security I took for granted with rust.
Not to mention just how goddamn expressive rust can be. Let bindings like if ok/err, else return? Assign from a match on Some(Ok(x))? Filter, map, and friends on any iterator? Oh my GOD the error handling with the question mark iterator? 100% confidence that if it compiles, no error, possible null value, or case is unhandled.
And all this WHILE giving you the amazing security benefits!
Ah, damn, caught me proselytizing again.
At this point, I've seen far more people being almost violently anti-rust than I've seen people being weirdly enthusiastic about rust. If Rust people are Jehovah's Witnesses, then a lot of the anti-Rust people are ISIS.
i think one factor (though definitely not all) of the dislike is the politics of the project, which are fairly inclusive and kind. some people can't stomach that. another factor might be that the mere existence of rust implies that a lot of people are not the 100x rockstar developer they might aspire to be. maybe it's also just a simple change = bad. though i have seen people who dislike rust also gravitate towards zig, and that also has some big differences. maybe it's a hate towards mozilla? when i talk to people who hate rust they don't articulate themselves well, so i have to speculate and i get nowhere. one thing i do hear about rust a lot is that it's ugly, but I don't really get that. i can't personally fathom disdaining to use a tool simply because of looks, and i also don't personally think rust is ugly.
I think a bunch of C programmers hate rust passionately because they always looked down their noses at principled languages for being slow.
Now a principled language is beating them on both speed and safety and it's as if the jocks lost a baseball game to the nerds who studied dynamics of solids and cut a series of little slots in their bats so that every time they hit the ball it went out of the park.
So much hate for the clever win over the brute force.
Correct me if I'm wrong because I never used Zig before, but I believe people like it because of the transparency in what the code is doing, like there's no hidden functionality. Where as Rust definitely does do that.
It's like the people complaining about SJWs and cancel culture. Sure, some people are annoying and use these things to harass others, but the vast majority are just normal people who care about certain things. But people on the other side, when they can't provide a good argument against them, start to vilify the people themselves. It's similar to how right wingers cry about decorum when they're more likely to vote for rapists.
I must admit that I had given into this anti-SJW hate at some point in my late teens, but I luckily realized how I was acting like a little bitch, hating on people I don't even know just because they're passionate about equality. The funny thing was, I still believed in their causes, but was pretty much brainwashed into believing that they're hurting the cause by being vocal. It's weird how dumb we often are.
The human mind has limited capacity for things to pay attention to. If your attention is occupied with tiptoeing around the loaded guns scattered all over the floor, sooner or later you’ll slip and trip over one.
Of course, you’re a virtuoso programmer, so you can pirouette balletically around the floorguns as you deliver brilliantly efficient code. Which is great, until you have an off day, or you get bored of coding, run off to join the circus as a professional knife-juggler and your codebase is inherited by someone of more conventional aptitude.
Programming languages offering to keep track of some of the things programmers need to be aware of has been a boon for maintainability of code and, yes, security. Like type systems: there’s a reason we no longer write assembly language, squeezing multiple things into the bits of a register, unless we’re doing party tricks like demo coding or trying to push very limited systems to their limits.
... until you have an off day, or you get bored of coding, run off to join the circus as a professional knife-juggler and your codebase is inherited by someone of more conventional aptitude.
Sometimes you even have to deal with having mere mortals on your team!
“Should I use rust or c++” is the wrong question IMO. The right question is “do I want the code I run, written by thousands or millions of randos, to be written in rust or c++”.
Unlike you babies I have Personal Responsibility and I write all of my code directly in assembly the way reagan intended. I don't need guard rails and I've never had any issues with it because my Personal Responsibility keeps me safe
Magnetised needle and a steady hand or gtfo
Skill issue takes are dumb as fuck. It's just republican personal responsibility takes using different language.
Intelligent people focus on producing systemically better outcomes.
The problem with these followers of rust is that they're heathens, disbelievers and worshippers of the devil. Just like all of you heretics. There is just one programming language for the true believer and it is FORTRAN. The pure and true FORTRAN, that is, which is punched into cards of virgin paper, not the heresy created by the blasphemy of 99.
C's compiler prevents common type bugs and handles things like register allocation for you? So does skill.
While I do totally see the advantages of rust and agree skill is not a solution given people make mistakes...I do agree a lot of the very vocal rust advocates do act almost religious and it is an annoying turn off.
We had the Java guys in year 2000, at least Rust seems to be a decent language.
Java was created so that teams of intermediate skill programmers could maintain large, long-lived code bases. And it did its job incredibly well.
If that is not your use case (or you do not want to admit that you are such a programmer), it may not be your favourite language.
I always like C# far better. It may be my favourite language overall. It has a bit more headroom and was designed somebody far more skilled. But it was designed to compete directly with Java. So, you know who it was built for.
Do you have time to talk about our lord Rust? Did you know it died for our bugs so we don't have to debug them at run time?
I love this argument because it means this dude is the only skilled C developer on the planet. Chromium devs are just chumps that should be replaced by this uncommon God.
I'd guess it's Rust fan's genuine belief that they have something revolutionary.
“Rust’s compiler prevents common bugs” So does skill. No offense to you, but, this trope is getting so tiresome. If you like the language then go ahead and use it.
If you're that much of a galaxybrain, you should be writing everything directly in opcodes. In reality, nobody is, and we invented languages to help us perform an activity the human brain is very poorly suited to.
This attitude also means that OP stares at their own obvious bugs on a screen all day and then decides they're great, which is level of detachment from reality frightening to me.
Sadly, it is a detachment from reality that is entirely normal, even typical. In all walks of life.
What I still find surprising, even though normal, is how technical people can push actual facts and evidence right out of their world view.
Sure, 70% of the bugs in C++ code bases are memory rated according to multiple sources. So let me aggressively and confidently berate this idiot that says the Rust compiler is doing something useful.
You do not have to use either language to see how idiotic this is. Even if you accept that this guy has “the skill” to make compiler help redundant, he has no point at all unless he thinks that “typical” C++ users have that same level of skill. And, provably and trivially researched—they do not. Being this wrong makes him, as self-evidenced, incompetent by definition.
All he proves in the end is that he is angry (and I guess not a fan of Rust).
“Angry and incompetent” is sadly a much more common trope than the ones he tires off.
There's some weird effects with language-specific bug rates.
In old Java, most uncaught exceptions are NullpointerExceptions, because most other exceptions used to be checked. Can't not catch a checked exception.
So they made Kotlin, where NullpointerExceptions are the only type of checked exceptions. Now there are no unhandled NPEs anymore but now you get tons of other exceptions.
"So does skill" I agree 100%
However, we're human. You show me a skilled developer who never causes bugs, and I'll show you a liar.
No matter how skilled or experienced a developer is, they always have the capacity to introduce a bug by accident.
Whether it's a typo, or simply being tired or distracted, or just having one of those moments, or even one of those days. It's completely normal.
Coding is just communication, and when working on larger codebases it can be just as nuanced as interpersonal communication. People miscommunicate every second of the day.
I've never used Rust.
Because most projects are worked on by multiple people, and you shouldn't trust that everyone who will work on something will have the same skill level as you
If there are two languages otherwise equivalent in NFRs, where one lets you make the mistakes and the other doesn't, you're a bit silly if you don't pick the latter.
Good engineers shouldn't struggle to use a different language, so that's not an argument
Everyone makes mistakes, no matter the level of skill
The really annoying part is all the people saying that you shouldn't like Rust because actually it's not magically bug free. Yeah, no shit. No one who touched Rust claims it lets you write bug free code. People like Rust because it's modern, fast, has great tooling, great documentation and really nice features like Traits and Algebraic data types. Memory and thread safety is just a bonus.
A real programmer only needs parentheses smdh
The language/compiler restricting some bad practices makes safer code with less skill. Btw, there's also Safe C++
I can sympathize with some people getting tired of "rewrite it in Rust", especially when it's suggested inappropriately. (Worst I saw was an issue opened on something, maybe a database, I don't remember. Someone said they were a new programmer and wanted to help and only knew a little Rust and that if the project was rewritten in Rust they could help.) But... Rust's compiler being able to do those things is actually super useful and amazing. This is like someone saying they don't need static types because they know the language good enough to not misuse the dynamic types. This is like someone saying they don't need C because they're good at assembly.
While it isn't something as simple as Rust being strictly better than C/C++, it's really silly to say that you being a good developer means you don't need guardrails. Everybody makes mistakes all the time. You're not perfect.
Glances at the mountains of horror stories a single bug in a C program caused
What's actually tiresome is how this keeps happening: https://paulgraham.com/avg.html
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