undefined | Better HN

0 pointsveltas1y ago0 comments

Sorry, I meant a "close to the hardware" language re parent.

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Depending on what you mean exactly I think Rust can be considered pretty close to the hardware. I.e. there's usually an obvious straightforward translation of each line of source code to an implementation in assembly language (which may not be what's actually emitted in practice due to optimizations, but the same is true in C).

There are of course some higher-level features like trait-based generics, so it's not really as close to the machine as C, but it's a lot closer to C IMO than something like Java (or even C++).

pjmlp1y ago

Ada, Modula-2 (both available on GCC), D (available on its reference implementation, GCC and LLVM), Swift, Object Pascal (Free Pascal, Delphi, Oxygen), Oberon variants (Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07, Active Oberon, Component Pascal), Zig, Nim, Odin,...

sebtron1y ago

Zig definitely has undefined behavior

https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.13.0/#Undefined-Behavior

pjmlp1y ago

All systems programming languages have undefined behaviour, the golden question is how much.

Also it wasn't what the parent asked for, and I quote: "close to the hardware" language

tupshin1y ago

Rust is not (much?) further from the hardware than C++

umanwizard1y ago

C++ is further than rust in my opinion. Vtables that support inheritance, as well as stack unwinding for exceptions, are pretty complicated and totally implicit in C++. Okay rust also technically has unwinding for panics to be fair but it’s rather unusual in practice for programmers to use panics to mean anything other than “crash the program now”.

pjmlp1y ago

Like trait implementations, and trait objects.

umanwizard1y ago

That’s fair, trait objects do cause a table to be generated, but they don’t support inheritance and subjectively I think they’re used less often than the OOP features of c++ that lead to vtable-based dynamic dispatch. (Traits are extremely common in rust, but dyn trait objects somewhat less so)

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umanwizard1y ago

There are of course some higher-level features like trait-based generics, so it's not really as close to the machine as C, but it's a lot closer to C IMO than something like Java (or even C++).

pjmlp1y ago

sebtron1y ago

Zig definitely has undefined behavior

https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.13.0/#Undefined-Behavior

pjmlp1y ago

All systems programming languages have undefined behaviour, the golden question is how much.

Also it wasn't what the parent asked for, and I quote: "close to the hardware" language

tupshin1y ago

Rust is not (much?) further from the hardware than C++

umanwizard1y ago

pjmlp1y ago

Like trait implementations, and trait objects.

umanwizard1y ago

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