TWiR quote of the week

Or maybe this one:

Safety measures make memory-unsafe languages slow

(Same source)

5 Likes

Strongly seconded, and I'd even suggest potentially highlighting the article even more than just another link in the link section.

For the quote, I think it's even more powerful to include the context directly following in the same article that

Based on historical vulnerability density, it’s likely that using Rust has already prevented hundreds of vulnerabilities from reaching production.

8 Likes

I think a better context is "There are approximately 1.5 million total lines of Rust code in AOSP across new functionality and components", but I wanted to keep the quote focused.

Meanwhile, I just had to try really hard not to leave angry comments under a StrangeLoop video, in which the presenter claimed there is no evidence that statically-typed languages prevent any real bugs from happening.

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In the depths of a computer's core,
Where bits and bytes are stored,
Lies a tool that's often ignored
But without it, things would be floored.

It's the rust borrow checker,
A guardian of memory,
Ensuring that data is in the right place
And never causing miseries.

With each line of code it carefully scans,
Checking for underflows and overflows,
Preventing errors, saving the day,
And keeping the program in a flow.

So let's give a nod to this silent hero,
Whose work may go unnoticed, but is never zero,
It's the rust borrow checker,
A vital part of the machine,
Ensuring our programs run clean.

-- ChatGPT prompted by Vivek Yadav

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... you can lead a horse to git but you cannot make it commit.

u/kibwen on reddit

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If you built a rocket and that rocket crashes, you wouldn't update the spec of the rocket to say "it is expected to crash after reaching 3000m altitude". But if you made a typo that says the rocket should crash after reaching 3000m altitude and somehow passed review, you wouldn't add a self detonation device into the rocket just because of this either.

-- SOF3, https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3355#issuecomment-1343908130

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"Rust does best when we're ambitious"

-- Niko Matsakis quoted by Yoshua Wuyts on his blog (thanks @yoshuawuyts for clearing the quote!)

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Hah, I've pinged the person in question whether they're comfortable being quoted. I intentionally kept them anonymous so I didn't have to clear the quote in question (it's close to winter holidays, I thought they might be offline already), but welp, so much for that haha.

I'll reach back out if they get back to me with permission to attribute this quote to them.

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Cleared the quote, you can attribute it to Niko Matsakis (:

1 Like

Self-suggestion:

Constraints liberate. Rust is for now the most liberating set of constraints we have in a programming language.

Yours truly on twitter

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Also self-nominating from this toot:

The Rust community has long had a codified commitment to being a safe space and the language has benefited enormously from it. It's not hard to find people from trans, gay, furry, or otherwise marginalized groups leading initiatives to improve the language or manage critical open source libraries. When we allow bigots in, our community suffers, both in character and in output.

- Brian Kung on Hachyderm.io

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@steffahn on this fine forum:

You haven’t “fooled” rustc, you are using unsafe code. Unsafe code means that all you can do is fool yourself.

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In Rust terms, the entire Windows system is unsafe. Do you mean that using Rust for Windows development is fooling yourself? I'm trying to apply Rust to a Windows app. Maybe it is a stillborn idea.

The quote is not "if you use unsafe, you're fooling yourself", rather, it is "if you use unsafe incorrectly, you're fooling yourself". When you use unsafe correctly, it doesn't apply.

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BlackBerry Limited (NYSE: BB; TSX: BB) and Elektrobit today announced they are collaborating on integration efforts to support the Rust programming language, empowering developers to build safe, reliable and efficient automotive software.

Thanks to @blonk for the link! Unfortunately, it doesn't contain any catchy quotes. Perhaps there is a more memetic announcement?

1 Like

Turns out, it's easier to test and refactor when objects are not carrying mutable references around or are in complex graphs of relationships.

Once I was no longer fighting the borrow checker and saw him more as an adviser than a hurdle, Rust became bliss.

From https://breakbuild.dev/blog/my-year-with-rust/ (which was already mentioned in TWiR, but I didn't see as a QotW suggestion).

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Unfortunately, the author goes on to give a lot of pretty unfounded criticism of the language in the same post (eg. the "crates are not mature" argument is wielded merely based on 0.x version numbers, pointing out an obvious misunderstanding and/or lack of experience and/or lack of research – this question has been explained to death and has no correlation with perceived or actual maturity). The same goes for citing the supposedly opinionated nature of the language as a bad part, arguing that "only time will tell whether it's right or wrong" – I mean, haven't the last 16 years been enough proof? And the list goes on – "Rust is not OOP" is declared a downside, too (whereas at best this is a subjective choice among equal paradigms, at worst it's not true since OOP proved to be highly problematic during the last few decades), etc. It would have been better for this person to gain more experience in the community and the ecosystem before giving unjustified criticism of matters s/he clearly doesn't fully grasp in the grand scheme of things.

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Working with traits has been hard. I find a need to revisit how to use traits quite often, especially when using generic types.

Jim Hodapp in My impressions of Rust after a year of working with it

Common arguments against Rust's safety guarantees:

  • The library you're binding to can have a segfault in it.
  • RAM can physically fail, causing dangling pointers.
  • The computer the Rust program is running on can be hit by a meteorite.
  • Alan Turing can come back from the dead and tell everyone that he actually made up computer science and none of it is real, thus invalidating every program ever made, including all Rust programs.

-- Ironmask @ Google To Allow Rust Code In The Chromium Browser - Phoronix Forums

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