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Understood. I have made significant contributions to GTK. My contributions possibly had memory leaks or memory corruption issues that will bring down the higher

Understood. I have made significant contributions to GTK. My contributions possibly had memory leaks or memory corruption issues that will bring down the higher Rust layer. I am trying to understand the purpose of the Rust layer. It is fine with me if it is because Rust is interesting, but what is being presented doesn’t seem like a Rust desktop environment _to me_.

deleted 5y ago
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IshKebab 5y ago
It's not 100% Rust but I think you would expect that GTK itself is fairly well tested - probably much better tested than any new app you write that uses it, so it is still worth it to write that app in Rust. And it has to be said that memory safety isn't Rust's only compelling feature. It also has a pretty great build system, a decent library ecosystem, a very strong type system which gives you an "if it compiles it works" experience surprisingly often, probably the best multithreading system, etc. etc.
Taywee 5y ago
The big selling point of Rust in respect to these kinds of scenarios is that it's very often that a C or C++ library says things like "You must not call function CallAfterFoo before function Foo is called", or "Once you call DestroyObject, that object must not be used again", or "You must not call SomethingDangerous while a ResourceOwningObject exists", and so on and so on. In well-tested libraries like GTK, SQLite, Curl, and such, they are often quite robust just based on having been heavily developed and tested by many people over a very long time, and there are still ways that they can be misused and abused that are usually well-documented and warned against. A well-developed Rust wrapper actually makes it impossible to misuse one of these libraries from Rust, and therefore better enables a much smaller team of developers to write secure, robust applications. Rust can guarantee these documented restrictions at the type level and even make impossible many error conditions. So even though the UI is GTK, Rust still enables developers to write more robust applications with less fear. Personally, I find that GTK with Rust is a very pleasant experience. It's less about guaranteeing that the lower libraries have no bugs and more about preventing people from interacting with the libraries in dangerous or buggy ways.
ranfdev 5y ago
I've made some small contributions to gtk-rs-core (the library providing rust bindings to glib, gdk...). While the lower layers written in C do impact the overall safety, the bindings are made to be as safe as possible. For example: every glib parameter that may take NULL in Rust becomes an Option<T>. GObject's methods are defined on traits and checked by the Rust type system. There are also some macros to provide an easy and safe interface to the GLib type system. All of this directly applies to gtk-rs. Overall, the bindings are well documented and with many examples. There's even a book. Also, there's a great community around them. Bindings website: https://gtk-rs.org/ https://gtk-rs.org/
pxc 5y ago
I agree! I think they're just using Rust because they'd rather use it than C, not because they need safety guarantees for the DE applications.

deleted 5y ago

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IshKebab 5y ago

It's not 100% Rust but I think you would expect that GTK itself is fairly well tested - probably much better tested than any new app you write that uses it, so it is still worth it to write that app in Rust. And it has to be said that memory safety isn't Rust's only compelling feature. It also has a pretty great build system, a decent library ecosystem, a very strong type system which gives you an "if it compiles it works" experience surprisingly often, probably the best multithreading system, etc. etc.

Taywee 5y ago

The big selling point of Rust in respect to these kinds of scenarios is that it's very often that a C or C++ library says things like "You must not call function CallAfterFoo before function Foo is called", or "Once you call DestroyObject, that object must not be used again", or "You must not call SomethingDangerous while a ResourceOwningObject exists", and so on and so on. In well-tested libraries like GTK, SQLite, Curl, and such, they are often quite robust just based on having been heavily developed and tested by many people over a very long time, and there are still ways that they can be misused and abused that are usually well-documented and warned against. A well-developed Rust wrapper actually makes it impossible to misuse one of these libraries from Rust, and therefore better enables a much smaller team of developers to write secure, robust applications. Rust can guarantee these documented restrictions at the type level and even make impossible many error conditions. So even though the UI is GTK, Rust still enables developers to write more robust applications with less fear. Personally, I find that GTK with Rust is a very pleasant experience. It's less about guaranteeing that the lower libraries have no bugs and more about preventing people from interacting with the libraries in dangerous or buggy ways.

ranfdev 5y ago

I've made some small contributions to gtk-rs-core (the library providing rust bindings to glib, gdk...). While the lower layers written in C do impact the overall safety, the bindings are made to be as safe as possible. For example: every glib parameter that may take NULL in Rust becomes an Option<T>. GObject's methods are defined on traits and checked by the Rust type system. There are also some macros to provide an easy and safe interface to the GLib type system. All of this directly applies to gtk-rs. Overall, the bindings are well documented and with many examples. There's even a book. Also, there's a great community around them. Bindings website: https://gtk-rs.org/ https://gtk-rs.org/

pxc 5y ago

I agree! I think they're just using Rust because they'd rather use it than C, not because they need safety guarantees for the DE applications.