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Pitfalls of Safe Rust

(corrode.dev)
168 points pjmlp | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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nerdile ◴[] No.43603402[source]
Title is slightly misleading but the content is good. It's the "Safe Rust" in the title that's weird to me. These apply to Rust altogether, you don't avoid them by writing unsafe Rust code. They also aren't unique to Rust.

A less baity title might be "Rust pitfalls: Runtime correctness beyond memory safety."

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burakemir ◴[] No.43603739[source]
It is consistent with the way the Rust community uses "safe": as "passes static checks and thus protects from many runtime errors."

This regularly drives C++ programmers mad: the statement "C++ is all unsafe" is taken as some kind of hyperbole, attack or dogma, while the intent may well be to factually point out the lack of statically checked guarantees.

It is subtle but not inconsistent that strong static checks ("safe Rust") may still leave the possibility of runtime errors. So there is a legitimate, useful broader notion of "safety" where Rust's static checking is not enough. That's a bit hard to express in a title - "correctness" is not bad, but maybe a bit too strong.

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whytevuhuni ◴[] No.43603865[source]
No, the Rust community almost universally understands "safe" as referring to memory safety, as per Rust's documentation, and especially the unsafe book, aka Rustonomicon [1]. In that regard, Safe Rust is safe, Unsafe Rust is unsafe, and C++ is also unsafe. I don't think anyone is saying "C++ is all unsafe."

You might be talking about "correct", and that's true, Rust generally favors correctness more than most other languages (e.g. Rust being obstinate about turning a byte array into a file path, because not all file paths are made of byte arrays, or e.g. the myriad string types to denote their semantics).

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/meet-safe-and-unsafe.html

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pjmlp ◴[] No.43604067[source]
Mostly, there is a sub culture that promotes to taint everything as unsafe that could be used incorrectly, instead of memory safety related operations.
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dymk ◴[] No.43604325[source]
That subculture is called “people who haven’t read the docs”, and I don’t see why anyone would give a whole lot of weight to their opinion on what technical terms mean
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Guthur ◴[] No.43606488[source]
Because of cult like belief structures growing up around rust, it's clear as day for us on the outside, I see it from the evangelists in the company I work for "rust is faster and safer to develop with when compared to c++", I'm no c++ fan but it's obviously nonsense.

I feel people took the comparison of rust to c and extrapolated to c++ which is blatantly disingenuous.

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1. goku12 ◴[] No.43608104[source]
The cult that I see growing online a lot are those who are invested in attacking Rust for some reason, though their arguments often indicate that they haven't even tried it. I believe that we're focusing so much on Rust evangelists that we're neglecting the other end of the zealotry spectrum - the irrational haters.

The Rust developers I meet are more interested in showing off their creations than in evangelizing the language. Even those on dedicated Rust forums are generally very receptive to other languages - you can see that in action on topics like goreleaser or Zig's comptime.

And while you have already dismissed the other commenter's experience of finding Rust nicer than C++ to program in, I would like to add that I share their experience. I have nothing against C++, and I would like to relearn it so that I can contribute to some projects I like. But the reason why I started with Rust in 2013 was because of the memory-saftey issues I was facing with C++. There are features in Rust that I find surprisingly pleasant, even with 6 additional years of experience in Python. Your opinion that Rust is unpleasant to the programmer is not universal and its detractions are not nonsense.

I appreciate the difficulty in learning Rust - especially getting past the stage of fighting the borrow checker. That's the reason why I don't promote Rust for immediate projects. However, I feel that the knowledge required to get past that stage is essential even for correct C and C++. Rust was easy for me to get started in, because of my background in digital electronics, C and C++. But once you get past that peak, Rust is full of very elegant abstractions that are similar to what's seen in Python. I know it works because I have trained js and python developers in Rust. And their feedback corroborates those assumptions about learning Rust.