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0 pointsjeffreyrogers10y ago0 comments

After having played around with Rust a bit and seeing it used in some non-trivial applications I've grown to like it a lot, despite being an initial skeptic. However it's aggravating that in every post about Rust which raises valid criticisms about the language (in this case having to do with the ease with which C allows you to do low level programming), those associated with the Rust project leap to its defense and suggest that Rust's decisions are right for every situation.

Just because Rust can't easily do things that C can doesn't make it a bad language, but it does mean that, shockingly, there are somethings that Rust isn't as well positioned for as other languages are.

Similarly, there are things that C is bad at. Both at the high level and the low level. At the low level it hides too much of the CPU's features so for some very low level programming you need to drop to assembly. At the high level it has obvious deficiencies, many of which Rust addresses, but for interfacing with the actual hardware it is tough to beat C in terms of convenience.

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pcwalton10y ago

Of those three issues, I see not sectioning off unsafe code as the only real defensible choice when comparing C to Rust. Whether you should have to type "unsafe" is a legitimate tradeoff; if all your code is unsafe, the unsafe keyword adds noise.

Undefined behavior and the lack of namespacing don't fall into this category, though. C would be a better language all around if it required that null pointer dereference trap to an error handler (at least on hardware with an MMU or MPU). It would also be a better language if it had a module system.

Not every engineering decision is a tradeoff. Sometimes certain decisions are just better all around. I think that modules and error handlers fall into this category.

mpweiher10y ago

> Not every engineering decision is a tradeoff.

Scratch the "not". For example, if I have a small-enough code-base, a module-system, is not worth it, unless it has zero cost. Or if the module system doesn't fit my needs, it will often be easier to create what I need if I don't have to work around what is there. Same with error handlers.

Every engineering decision is a tradeoff, though you may be in a space where the tradeoffs obviously point in one direction.

pcwalton10y ago

A module system is always worth it because every program needs to use library functions. Even if you think you don't, LLVM will generate calls to library functions for ordinary code; for example, if you move structures around on the stack, LLVM might just decide to call memcpy(), even if you didn't ever import string.h. (Checking your code after the fact to verify there are no library calls doesn't get around this because a new version of the compiler might add a library call where there wasn't one before.) Now you want some mechanism to isolate your code's names from the library's names. That's a module system.

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0 pointsjeffreyrogers10y ago0 comments

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pcwalton10y ago

Not every engineering decision is a tradeoff. Sometimes certain decisions are just better all around. I think that modules and error handlers fall into this category.

mpweiher10y ago

> Not every engineering decision is a tradeoff.

Every engineering decision is a tradeoff, though you may be in a space where the tradeoffs obviously point in one direction.

pcwalton10y ago

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