TWiR quote of the week

[Mokuz]

I think Rust being difficult is like saying you had good parents because they let you play with knives. Rust may seem hard at first but borrowck is just looking after you.

To elaborate writing a fast and memory safe multi-threaded webserver is easy in Rust; if it compiles it works, but difficult in C since while it may be easier to get it to compile it might not work correctly.

[mmmmib]

the strains of the project have hurt a lot of people over the years and I think maybe the only path to recovery involves getting some distance from it.

Graydon Hoare on Twitter

[anon80458984]

@Hyeonu

unsafe {} literally means "shut up compiler I know what I'm doing and this code doesn't have any UB". In this case you've lied to the compiler, there's no guarantee that the compiler gives you meaningful result back.

Why the code compiles?

unsafe {} literally means "shut up compiler I know what I'm doing and this code doesn't have any UB". In this case you lied to the compiler, there's no guarantee that the compiler will gives you meaningful result back.

[anon80458984]

@Michael-F-Bryan

FP languages are often completely immutable so you'll fall into this pattern naturally. It's kinda hard to create a half-initialized thing and populate it later when you aren't allowed to mutate anything.

Common newbie mistakes or bad practices

I think it also depends on your background or coding style. FP languages are often completely immutable so you'll fall into this pattern naturally. It's kinda hard to create a half-initialized thing and populate it later when you aren't allowed to mutate anything. On the other hand, OO languages are much happier to let you initialize an object after it has been constructed, especially because object references can be null by default and they have no qualms about mutability... You could argue t…

[EvanCarroll]

He devoted his talk to not trolling,

"That's enough about languages that suck, let's talk about C++" - Miguel Young de la Sota speaking on Rust's handling of Pin before talking about C++ at RustConf 2021

[anon80458984]

@ZiCog

Politic: Before we had written a line of code our former employer threatened to sue us thinking we had stolen the code we wrote for them before they went bust. We had not. I thought it would be prudent to implement the similar functionality we needed in a different language, just in case. So what was JS and node.js became Rust.

https://users.rust-lang.org/t/common-newbie-mistakes-or-bad-practices/64821/46

[ZiCog]

It's nice to be quoted on TWiR.

But is that intended to be an example of a newbie mistake or bad practice? Or the opposite.

[anon80458984]

@ZiCog

But is that intended to be an example of a newbie mistake or bad practice? Or the opposite.

I got a chuckle out of the following visualization:

ZiCog's former employer: They copy pasted our code.
ZiCog: They used JS. We use Rust.
Judge: Case closed.

EDIT: I am not a lawyer. The above is not legal advice. If you are in ZiCog's situation, consult a lawyer.

[ZiCog]

Allmost right.

Except they accused us of having run away with the code for an entire project, which we were picking up from an existing customer. And of not delivering it to them, after we had and they had not paid us or the office rent for months.

I was inspired by the story of Compaq and others clean room reverse engineering the IBM PC BIOS so that they could make PC clones without stealing the original BIOS code. So I was looking to start over with a new language, I had only then discovered Rust and soon decided to bet the farm on it. It's been working very well.

"Case closed". Well, we have not heard back from them... yet.

Luckily my partner's girl friend is a well qualified commercial lawyer

[pickfire]

Rust maybe “multi-paradigm general-purpose programming language” but it's also incredibly opinionated and tries very hard to stir you toward “great APIs” (good APIs are easy to use, great APIs are hard to abuse).

I think just maybe not "incredible opinionated" but the last words seemed nice.

Common newbie mistakes or bad practices

I'm not sure if this belongs here or in some other place, but if novice in question is not a total novice then probably the most common mistake they do is an attempt to write JavaScript in Rust or Python in Rust or some other language in Rust. Rust is usually presented as “multi-paradigm general-purpose programming language” which somehow convinces people who know some other mainstream language that they should be able to just write code in Java or C# and then, somehow, mechanically translate …

[Yandros]

@quinedot

The signature of your function is your contract with not only the compiler, but also users of your function.

Succintly put , this is sometimes overlooked.

[bes]

RustConf 2021: - Compile-Time Social Coordination by Zac Burns

Do you want to know what was harder than learning lifetimes? Learning the same lessons through twenty years of making preventable mistakes.

Perfect.

[janriemer]

Shameless plug

"All applications that can be (re)written in Rust will eventually be (re)written in Rust" - Riemer's law

Posted on Mastodon.

See Atwood's law for context.

[TomP]

From How can we teach people about self-referential types?

there's no magic technique that will turn every self-referential pumpkin into an elegant data-oriented carriage.

[briankung]

Twitter surfaced this and I couldn't help but to nominate this tweet

https://twitter.com/Gankra_/status/1443624416986939400

They go on to say:

i lived in a glorious ivory tower of algorithms and datastructures, absolutely refusing to think about what the fuck was in std::fs, even while i was literally on the team that ostensibly maintained it

now my tower is in ruins, i know what an OpenOptions is, alas, i am no more

i must soothe my burns with the knowledge that i still have absolutely no idea what is in std::net

although even that is ash in my mouth knowing i was also forced to actually write the word "async" like a coward and a fool

[aDotInTheVoid]

Rust really turned me on to the idea that there are actually two places to put data of indeterminate length: space (heap), and time (iterators, write-APIs)

Brandon Smith on twitter

[alice]

There's a common trope among people unfamiliar with rust where they assume that if you use unsafe at all, then it's just as unsafe as C and rust provided no benefit. Comparing C's approach to safety vs Rust's is like comparing an open world assumption to a closed world assumption in formal logic systems [1]. In C, you publish your api if it's possible to use correctly (open world). In Rust, you publish a safe api if it's im possible to use in correctly (closed world). Rust's key innovation here is that it enables you to build a 'bridge' from open world (unsafe) to a closed world (safe), a seemingly impossible feat that feels like somehow pairwise reducing an uncountable infinity with a countable infinity. Rust's decision to design an analogous closed-world assumption for safe code is extremely powerful, but it seems very hard for old school C programmers to wrap their head around it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-world_assumption

source

[quinedot]

Rust is the language where you get the hangover first.

Unattributed, via RustConf 2021 - Project Update: Lang Team by Niko Matsakis

[alice]

The biggest failure in Rust‘s communication strategy has been the inability to explain to non-experts that unsafe abstractions are the point, not a sign of failure

By withoutboats at tweet

[andreasklostermaier]

Working today, I realized my Javascript got rusty.

By micha_38 in the Berline.rs Matrix Chat:

You're invited to talk on Matrix