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0 pointsbArray10mo ago0 comments

> This side steps the issue which is "Does Rust help you make software more correct?" No one is arguing that Rust is perfect. There are plenty of bugs in my Rust software. The question is only -- are we better off with Rust than the alternatives?

There is a lot of embedded knowledge in existing implementations, Rust deals with just one small class of bugs but drops a lot of this knowledge in the process.

I would generally be in favour of just introducing better memory management to C/C++ and hard enforcing it in particular repositories.

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mustache_kimono10mo ago

> There is a lot of embedded knowledge in existing implementations,

Agree. The question whether to rewrite and/or whether to use any new implementation should take this fact into account.

> Rust deals with just one small class of bugs but drops a lot of this knowledge in the process.

Hard disagree. Rust explicitly deals with several very important classes of bugs (memory safety and concurrency), and also aids correctness via other helpful design features like tagged unions and immutability by default. But Rust, the language, does not drop any knowledge in the process, though any decision to rewrite in any language may drop some knowledge, and/or may create new bugs, in the process.

> I would generally be in favour of just introducing better memory management to C/C++ and hard enforcing it in particular repositories.

This is really easy to say, but in practice it just hasn't worked out, and there is loads of empirical evidence to back that up.[0] It is not as if market incentives don't exist to create better C/C++ code.[1] If you have a way to do it better, I have no doubt Google, half a dozen other hyper-scalers, and the US government will pay you handsomely for your solution. But, at this point in time, if this is the solution, I'm afraid it's time to put up or shut up.

[0]: https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2021/presentation/ga... [1]: https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/translating-all-c-to...

bArrayOP10mo ago

> This is really easy to say, but in practice it just hasn't worked out, and there is loads of empirical evidence to back that up.[0] It is not as if market incentives don't exist to create better C/C++ code.[1] If you have a way to do it better, I have no doubt Google, half a dozen other hyper-scalers, and the US government will pay you handsomely for your solution. But, at this point in time, if this is the solution, I'm afraid it's time to put up or shut up.

It really wasn't too difficult to get high reliability for memory management in C/C++ which is also concurrency safe (I have active projects running for years like this). The difficulty was enforcing it so that you are reduced to a subset of the language and it has to be followed with discovery at compile time.

The trap I'm concerned we are falling into is the "just re-write the C/C++ project in Rust". I still believe the solution is in enforcing better practices at compile time.

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