12 ms·

I know people like to hate on errors as values as in Go, but I think exceptions are worse when it comes to unexpected side effects and this is a prime example!

• josephg 8y ago
  Yes; although in GC’ed languages like Go and JS it’s still very easy to leak OS level resources like file handles because you still need to remember to close() them. (Although go’s defer blocks are a fantastic assist here). This is one area Rust really excels - the same mechanism for making sure memory gets cleaned up also automatically closes network sockets and file descriptors when they go out of scope. Even in the case of errors it’s impossible to forget to clean up. That entire finally block is unnecessary in rust.
  • throw0u1t 8y ago
    You're talking about the Drop trait? I'm learning Rust coming from Go. It looks cool, but it also concerns me how most data structures in the stdlib use unsafe blocks to defeat the borrow checker. This is not the point of Rust, I would have thought?!
    • steveklabnik 8y ago
      One of the criteria for belonging in the standard library is “needs a lot of unsafe to implement”, so the standard library has more unsafe code than your average codebase. Beyond that, to some degree, it is the point of Rust: limit unsafe things so that you can reason about them more easily. The CPU is inherently not safe, so it has to exist on some level. rust gives you tools to manage this.