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Flattening Rust’s learning curve

(corrode.dev)
451 points birdculture | 6 comments | 13 May 25 22:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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mdwhatcott ◴[14 May 25 01:17 UTC] No.43979711[source]▶
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LAC-Tech ◴[14 May 25 02:15 UTC] No.43980029[source]▶
I have taken the time to learn rust and you're absolutely right. It's a very complex, design-by-committee language. It has brilliant tooling, and is still much less complex than it's design-by-committee competitor C++, but it will never be easy to learn.
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1. worik ◴[14 May 25 02:41 UTC] No.43980172[source]▶
There is a trade off. Rust gave us fast, and safe. It did not give us "easy to learn".

I think it is a very good example of why "design by committee" is good. The "Rust Committee" has done a fantastic job

Thank you

They say a camel is a horse designed by a committee (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_camel_is_a_horse_designed_b...)

Yes:

* Goes twice as far as a horse

* On half the food and a quarter the water of a horse

* Carries twice as much as a horse

Yes, I like design by committee. I have been on some very good, and some very bad committees, but there is nothing like the power of a good committee

Thank you Rust!

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2. LAC-Tech ◴[14 May 25 03:28 UTC] No.43980457[source]▶
It's just a programming language, not a religion.
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3. psychoslave ◴[14 May 25 06:13 UTC] No.43981388[source]▶
Well, it does look like there is a will to mimic religious social structure in the community, be it as a satiric form of it. I mean, I guess they purposefully named their pancakes cargo, as in "cargo cult", didn't they? Rustacean, rustomicon, and the other few words I saw leak out of the community all seem to go in the same spirit. I'm almost surprised they didn't went with more fancy terms for these core concepts of ownership and borrowing. Perl was also full of religious stuff like blessing your object, though Larry was actually more in the "true devot" side of the line.
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4. conorjh ◴[14 May 25 10:23 UTC] No.43982847{3}[source]▶
the dogmatic culture would probably be my first suggestion. i always ask why are there any CVEs for rust if its "memory-safe" but never get an answer suprisingly
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5. psychoslave ◴[14 May 25 12:35 UTC] No.43983755{4}[source]▶
CVE is not only for memory leak though, while eliminating (or even drastically reducing) such a class of issue is a fair point to advertise, it should not be confused as a magic safety facility that makes go away any security concern.
6. steveklabnik ◴[14 May 25 13:53 UTC] No.43984581{4}[source]▶
> i always ask why are there any CVEs for rust if its "memory-safe" but never get an answer suprisingly

The answer is straightforward: bugs exist. Even in formally proven software, mistakes can be made. Nothing is perfect.

Additionally, memory safety is a property that when people talk about it, they mean by default. All languages contain some amount of non-proven unsafe code in their implementation, or via features like FFI. Issues can arise when these two worlds interact. Yet, real-world usage shows that these cases are quite few compared to languages without these defaults. The exceptions are also a source of the CVEs you’re talking about.