TWiR quote of the week

I would say the benefits I saw from the start were that you didn’t have to think about race conditions and memory corruption, and memory safety in general. You know, just writing correct and robust code from the start. So that was basically my first impression, but now I have also come to realize that there are many other aspects. You get just as big benefits from the side effects of that first aspect.

5 Likes

Semver has its philosophy, but a pragmatic approach to versioning is:

<upgrades may break API> . <downgrades may break API> . <fine either way>

Beatifully put by @kornel in this thread.

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people don’t realize that the reason their idea doesn’t work is not because the idea is wrong, it’s because the language (or, often, the compiler) is limited.

By Niko Matsakis in this blog post.

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"But we can do it ourselves," say some hardcore kernel kings. "Look, some of this has been going 30 years without a problem." Indeed. But because an expert surgeon can whip out a spleen safely doesn't mean you can sell scalpels on eBay with "Instant Appendectomy" instruction leaflets. Rust reduces risk without compromising performance, which means more people can write better code faster. Who doesn't ache for this?

-- Rupert Goodwins @ Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing • The Register

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It’s not Rust that you are learning. It’s your goddamn program’s behavior. Rust just does not let you cut that corner.

-- /u/myzt/ @ this reddit comment

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BurntSushi is a super experienced programmer who always seems to know what’s right

Shepmaster occasionally pops up to keep things level, and provides definitive answers and edits to all stackoverflow questions

Epage is the ecosystem guy thanklessly maintaining the things that make the magic of cargo possible

Dtolnay is an AI written in rust with the sole purpose of improving rust.

/u/trevg_123 - here

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From @PredragGruevski's recent Twitter post:

Diagnostics like [rustc's] are why writing Rust isn't just another "git gud" Dark Souls-style experience.

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I like the "as long as...", very nicely worded.

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There's a lot of weird debate about whether Rust in the kernel is useful or not... in my experience, it's way more useful than I could've ever imagined!

I went from 1st render to a stable desktop that can run run games, browsers, etc. in about two days of work on my driver (!!!)

All the concurrency bugs just vanish with Rust! Memory gets freed when it needs to be freed! Once you learn to make Rust work with you, I feel like it guides you into writing correct code, even beyond the language's safety promises. It's seriously magic! :sparkles:

There is absolutely no way I wouldn't have run into race conditions, UAFs, memory leaks, and all kinds of badness if I'd been writing this in C.

In Rust? Just some logic bugs and some core memory management issues. Once those were fixed, the rest of the driver just worked!!

-- Asahi Lina on twitter

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Crater answers the age-old question: if a change breaks in the forest and no one is around to notice, is it really a breaking change?

No, says crater.

Not posted this week, but I found it quite funny.

-- clarfonthey

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I think it's worth noting that the fact that this program fails to compile whereas the analogous Python runs but gives the wrong answer is exactly what Rust's ownership and borrowing system is about.

@kpreid in Capturing a copy of a local variable for a lambda - #5 by kpreid

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While helping a friend with some Rust code. They got a sequence of helpful error messages:

Wow, Rust really knows how to make a man feel good about himself.

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Y'all low level people live in a wild world

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/y2qah5/why_does_the_compiler_partially_vectorize_my_code/is4ndfn/

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If all the bikeshedding happens once in a rust team somewhere, they can spare all us pain of non-productive discussions.

-- Reddit - Dive into anything

1 Like

Don't take away the fun part :-\

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Given that you're a team member, I'm going to push back on this quote as well. Not because bike-shedding is fun per se, but because community involvement is one of the great things about Rust.

The wider community may see problems and solutions a focused team do not, and have use-cases they haven't considered. The more language evolution leans towards fiat-by-team, the more concerned and frustrated I get. And I do feel it's increasing with time.

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I don't know where the balance is between language design by one person or small team or design by contributions from a wide user base. C++ has a huge team of contributors, all be it members of the standards committee, which is huge, and see what a huge train wreck of complexity and incomprehensibility that has become.

workingjubilee on The assembly code generated by calling <[T]>::sort_unstable_by contains bounds checking code · Issue #92958 · rust-lang/rust

We're only concerned about producing high-quality garbage as fast as possible.

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I present to you a humble limerick:

The language of choice was Rust.
The codebase would need to adjust.
’Cause a problem would come:
“Enum of None, Err, and Some?
A solution just is a must!”

-- MettiGrove @ Reddit - Dive into anything

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Also, I don't know how much of this is because Rust is special or because BurntSushi is a national treasure and his CSV library is impeccably constructed and documented.

https://github.com/losvedir/transit-lang-cmp/blob/1b439393e3054bd3b69314c0716cd22e59435f29/README.md?plain=1#L323-L325

10 Likes