this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Rust programmers vastly overestimate how many bugs are caused by memory problems
That's misinformation. There's no overestimation. The problem is so bad that even the US government advocates the use of memory safe languages (including GC languages).
I have used C and C++. You need laser sharp focus to avoid memory safety errors even after you learn what causes them and how to avoid them. It's significantly easier to write programs in Rust because any lapse in care to avoid memory safety bugs are caught by the compiler.
What I mean is that even if you use GC languages like Java or Go you will still encounter annoying bugs. I’m not saying that memory safety isn’t important.
You said bugs caused by 'memory problems'. And that Rust programmers vastly overestimate them. Those aren't generic logical bugs that you get in Go or Java. And Rust never claimed to solve logical bugs.
I’m more poking fun at Rust enthusiasts who make it seem like programs are automatically bug free just because they’re written in Rust.
Haskell enthusiasts made similar claims as well.
I don't know, I've caused a whole lot in C/C++. I haven't actually written anything in Rust either, so I'm somewhat unbiased.
Amen. But they have to, because that's where they spend most of their cognitive focus, and it's Rust's "killer feature."
Yeah. The verdict is still out on whether having a deeply surly compiler will help me focus on iterating and understanding the client's needs.
I run Python CICD controls on main with at least the same level of prissiness (as Rust comes with), but at least Python knows how to shut up and let me prototype.
I'm currently not convinced that Rust's opinionated design hits a useable long term sweet spot.
But I think if Rust adds a debug flag
--fuck-off-i-need-to-try-something, it could genuinely become the next Python, and the world would be better for it.Edit: And if I just missed the
--fuck-off-i-need-to-try-somethingRust flag, someone point me at it, and I'll gladly give Rust another run.Once you get the hang of rust you don't ever need to ask it to do unsafe things. It's not really any faster to do things unsafe
Yeah. Which is how I roll with Python now, as a Python Zen master. But Python was a little charmer when I was learning it to replace my Perl scripts.
In contrast, Rust would not shut up the last time I was trying to do an unsafe local bubble sort, just to get to know it. What I got to know was that I was working with a language that was going to go out of it's way to get in my, each time way I wanted to do something it didn't like.
Rust was easily the worst first date with a programming language I have had in a long time, and I can code in both varieties of 'Pikachu'.
Again, it's just my first impression, not the last word on the language. But I have enough tools in my belt that I didn't need to add Rust.
I'll try that 'unsafe' flag next time, and we will see if it can sort my local music files by artist name without having a security fit.
Edit: Responses here have convinced me not to give Rust another shot. Reeks of the Java community. If that's what's happening here, the Java devs can have this one to themselves. They'll probably fill it with XML again. I didn't want to like Rust anyway. And everyone needs to get off my lawn.
You're missing the point. Tools are different. Trying to learn and use rust by writing unsafe bubble sort is pointless. Use it to actually accomplish something and you'll find out just how amazing it is.
Using the ecosystem that exists to be productive and not have to think at all about whether what you're doing is correct is the point. It catches the subtle errors for you and lets you use the powerful libraries like clap for command line parsing, tokio, etc.
I wasn't being that picky, and I was using the ecosystem. Rust just has lousy compiler warnings.
I know dozens of languages, so I don't mind risking looking dumb when I say "this tool isn't very good yet".
Rust's compiler, considering what it asks for, isn't good enough at guiding the developer toward those asks. It actively wastes the one crucial low-supply computing resource: developer time.
I could have figured it out, if I had to. But I didn't have to. I moved on to the next interesting language to try out. It was goLang, and it had isn't own bullshit, but it wasn't as bad as Rust.
I've written in Haskell and Brainfuck. I don't mind esoteric languages.
But Rust presents itself as a solid general purpose pragmatic development tool, which is great to strive for, but it wasn't there yet, last time I gave it a chance.
I want Rust to succeed in replacing Python, because the world would be better off with better security defaults. But Rust had not, last I checked, attracted the necessary usability specialist contributors, to have any chance at that goal.
Edit: I no longer want Rust to replace Python. Y'all got a problem presenting yourselves, kids. It's going to hurt your language adoption rate.
Edit 2: And get off my lawn!
You're the only person I've ever heard this from. Rust's compiler warnings are amazing. Like 2nd to none
It's very possible it's improved since I tried it last. I'll put it back on my list to give it another go.
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.slice.html#method.sort_unstable
Thanks. I found and tried that, but what I really needed was a useful compiler error, which Rust did not provide.
Rust desperately needed a usability makeover, last time I tried it.
It amuses me that my fellow security gurus push Rust hard, because we sit in the same policy-pushers conferences as the usability specialists, but we don't always learn enough from them.
Edit: The responses here are quite revealing. I'm not seeing any of my usability mentors in the Rust diehard fan mix.
None of this has convinced me to give Rust another go. Its community, did not present well here.
Sorry what? Rust has literally been known for having some of the most useful compiler warnings imaginable. It's like, a huge selling point. Misleading warnings are far and few, and usually it'll literally point you at the exact tokens that caused an error and gives you a solution to fix it.
Are you sure that your inability to write Rust isn't caused by a lack of understanding of the language's pointer/ownership/lifetime rules, or the type system? I would be inclined to believe that someone who mainly just uses Python (or any other GC'd language really, but especially extremely high-level/"low-code" dynamically-typed languages like Python/Lua/JavaScript) wouldn't exactly be too good at those concepts, but they're pretty important in the context of languages like Rust.
And yet, that was not my experience.
I'm sure it is. I'm an old man who codes proficiently in dozens of languages.
Rust isn't some messianic message I need to forget everything I previously learned for.
I'm happy to adapt. I let Python have it's goddamned four spaces, even.
But Rust couldn't be arsed, at the time, to tell me what it wanted in terms clear to someone only proficient in dozens of other languages.
So Rust can either up it's 'here's what you need to know' game, or it can continue to get off my damn lawn.
It's possible, even hopeful, that Rust has massively improved since I gave it a test run. It would be hard for it have gotten worse, frankly.
Your tone, here, comes across like the folks who denied that Java had a serious community culture problem while the rest of us quietly moved on to Python.
If you're confident it's better now, you can simply say, "I think it's a lot better now, you might like it."
That flag exists, it's called
unsafefor if you need to tell the borrow checker to trust you orunwrapif you don't want to deal with handling errors on most ADTs.You can always cast anything to an unmanaged pointer type and use it in unsafe code.
Thank you. I'll check it out next time.