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I’d argue that ‘a bunch of additional code’ to solve for memory safety is exactly what you’re doing in the ‘defining memory safety away’ example with Rust or Sw

I’d argue that ‘a bunch of additional code’ to solve for memory safety is exactly what you’re doing in the ‘defining memory safety away’ example with Rust or Swift. It’s just code you didn’t write and thus likely don’t understand as well. This can potentially lead to performance and/or control flow issues that get incredibly difficult to debug.

agarren 1y ago
That sounds a bit unfair. All that code that we neither wrote nor understood, I think in the case of Rust, it’s either the borrow checker or the compiler itself doing something it does best - i.e., “defining memory safety away”. If that’s the case, then labeling such tooling and language-enforced memory safety mechanisms as “a bunch of additional code…you didn’t write and…don’t understand” appears somewhat inaccurate, no?
- rk06 1y ago
  It is quite fair as far as rust is concerned. For simple data structures, like doubly linked list,are hard problems for rust
  - josephg 1y ago
    So? That wasn't the claim. The GP poster said this: > This can potentially lead to performance and/or control flow issues that get incredibly difficult to debug. Writing a linked list in rust isn't difficult because of control flow issues, or because rust makes code harder to debug. (If you've spent any time in rust, you quickly learn that the opposite is true.) Linked lists are simply a bad match up for the constraints rust's borrow checker puts on your code. In the same way, writing an OS kernel or a high performance b-tree is a hard problem for javascript. So what? Every language has things its bad at. Design your program differently or use a different language.
josephg 1y ago
> This can potentially lead to performance and/or control flow issues that get incredibly difficult to debug. The borrow checker only runs at compile-time. It doesn't change the semantic meaning - or the resulting performance - of your code. The borrow checker makes rust a much more difficult and frustrating language to learn. The compiler will refuse to compile your code entirely if you violate its rules. But there's nothing magical going on in the compiler that changes your program. A rust binary is almost identical to the equivalent C binary.

agarren 1y ago

That sounds a bit unfair. All that code that we neither wrote nor understood, I think in the case of Rust, it’s either the borrow checker or the compiler itself doing something it does best - i.e., “defining memory safety away”. If that’s the case, then labeling such tooling and language-enforced memory safety mechanisms as “a bunch of additional code…you didn’t write and…don’t understand” appears somewhat inaccurate, no?

rk06 1y ago
It is quite fair as far as rust is concerned. For simple data structures, like doubly linked list,are hard problems for rust
- josephg 1y ago
  So? That wasn't the claim. The GP poster said this: > This can potentially lead to performance and/or control flow issues that get incredibly difficult to debug. Writing a linked list in rust isn't difficult because of control flow issues, or because rust makes code harder to debug. (If you've spent any time in rust, you quickly learn that the opposite is true.) Linked lists are simply a bad match up for the constraints rust's borrow checker puts on your code. In the same way, writing an OS kernel or a high performance b-tree is a hard problem for javascript. So what? Every language has things its bad at. Design your program differently or use a different language.

josephg 1y ago

> This can potentially lead to performance and/or control flow issues that get incredibly difficult to debug. The borrow checker only runs at compile-time. It doesn't change the semantic meaning - or the resulting performance - of your code. The borrow checker makes rust a much more difficult and frustrating language to learn. The compiler will refuse to compile your code entirely if you violate its rules. But there's nothing magical going on in the compiler that changes your program. A rust binary is almost identical to the equivalent C binary.