TWiR quote of the week

A poem, courtesy of @varkor:

Bastion of the Turbofish

Beware travellers, lest you venture into waters callous and unforgiving,
where hope must abandoned, ere it is cruelly torn from you. For here stands
the bastion of the Turbofish: an impenetrable fortress holding unshaking
against those who would dare suggest the supererogation of the Turbofish.

Once I was young and foolish and had the impudence to imagine that I could
shake free from the coils by which that creature had us tightly bound. I
dared to suggest that there was a better way: a brighter future, in which
Rustaceans both new and old could be rid of that vile beast. But alas! In
my foolhardiness my ignorance was unveiled and my dreams were dashed
unforgivingly against the rock of syntactic ambiguity.

This humble program, small and insignificant though it might seem,
demonstrates that to which we had previously cast a blind eye: an ambiguity
in permitting generic arguments to be provided without the consent of the
Great Turbofish. Should you be so naïve as to try to revolt against its
mighty clutches, here shall its wrath be indomitably displayed. This
program must pass for all eternity, fundamentally at odds with an impetuous
rebellion against the Turbofish.

My heart aches in sorrow, for I know I am defeated. Let this be a warning
to all those who come after. Here stands the bastion of the Turbofish.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/53562

22 Likes
note: downstream crates may implement trait `std::clone::Clone` for type `&mut _`

rustc, via eddyb

3 Likes

I agree with the goal, I just think it is impossible. Not that this has ever stopped anyone in Rust land

--Ralf Jung

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Zeitgeist of Rust: developing load bearing software that will survive us.
-- Bryan Cantrill: The Summer of RUST (1:08:10)

8 Likes

.expect("this will work if the computer isn't a coward")

Credit to @elomatreb@social.elomatreb.eu on Mastodon

9 Likes

Sometimes bad designs will fail faster in Rust

Catherine West @ Rustconf

5 Likes

Rust beginners worrying about lifetimes is like kids worrying about quicksand. Both turn out to be a non-issue in life.

frequentlywrong at a discussion about NLL

6 Likes

interesting, because this also appeared on some podcast

Rust is a Fast Programming Language. Rust programs are therefore “fast,” especially so if you write them with the correct observations to the arcane ley lines of birth and death known as “lifetimes,” and also remember to pass cargo the --release flag.

– Adam Perry in lolbench: automagically and empirically discovering Rust performance regressions

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<...> low-level memory-mongling is what C was designed for, and it is good at it. This is a great way to build low-level systems, but a shitty way to engineer software as a whole.

-- Porting C to Rust

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There actually are NOT very many places where the C code’s behavior conflicts with Rust’s borrowing rules. This is both somewhat surprising, because there’s no way this code was written with Rust’s borrowing semantics in mind, and also entirely sensible, since Rust’s borrowing semantics are often quite close to how you actually want your code to behave anyway.

Porting C To Rust

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Not a rusty quote, but still nice:

There's two hard problems in computer engineering: cache invalidation, type naming and off-by-one errors

-- Arno Lepisk “Avoiding Disasters with Strongly Typed C++”

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Sorry, that's very much not from this week :wink: See TwoHardThings for some history

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Panic is "pulling over to the side of the road" whereas crash is "running into a telephone pole".

/u/zzzzYUPYUPphlumph on reddit.

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I'd like to also nominate the full quote from the same source:

Panic is the car automatically pulling over to the side of the road, shutting down the engine, and refusing to restart when the blood-alchohol monitor detects that the driver is intoxicated and undefined behavior is letting things continue until the driver "crashes" into a bunch of school children in a cross-walk.

5 Likes

To be fair to @KillTheMule, that was added in an edit. (It wasn't there 8 hours ago when I went to bed.)

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None of [Rust's] "safe" behaviors can lead to truly undefined behavior. ... If an attacker can only crash or deadlock your program, that's still bad, but it usually can't escalate into Front Page of the New York Times levels of bad.

Another one from the same thread, qualifying Rust's safety

1 Like

@withoutboats on internals

[It is] not only the systems programming problems that Rust tackles and makes accessible, but also the particular intersection of different expertises and goals - the systems problems, the type theoretical approach, the commitment to an accessible user experience - that [makes] Rust a fulcrum of learning for me. Even as my knowledge grows, there [is] always a more informed person - often a world class expert - available to answer my questions.

(continued)

I’ve been very fortunate over these past 4 years to have had the opportunity to become more and more involved in Rust, to the point that now it is my full time employment. It makes me so glad to hear that my work has had for others the impact that the work of others before had on me.

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From this blog post:

In Rust there are entire classes of bugs that are simply impossible to create because of the compile time guarantees. Because it’s software, there will be bugs. Oh yes, there will be bugs. However, we can create all new bugs and not trip over these other ones that we’ve been creating for the last four-plus decades.

(continued)

This is the payoff, and despite the strictness of the compiler, Rust’s bet is that if you learn the way you can be as productive (or more) than with another language. In Programming Rust, Jim Blandy and Jason Orendorff refer to this as “Rust’s radical wager.”

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I personally think this is kinda killer feature.

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