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akagusu | 26 days ago

We need memory safety but Rust is not the answer.

It has no formal spec, changes too fast, depends on third party libraries that change faster than I can breath, and is controlled by a foundation that is controlled by big tech corps.

What could go wrong?

discuss

order

pjmlp|26 days ago

It has a partial spec.

https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/ferrocene-25-11-0/

Lets not forget not having a formal spec apparently wasn't an issue for C, which only got standardized in 1989, and even K&R C only specified a subset of its behaviours, which is a reason why there is so much UB, and implementation specific behaviours with YOLO C, as the Fil-C author likes to call it.

snovymgodym|26 days ago

> Lets not forget not having a formal spec apparently wasn't an issue for C

C emerged in the 1970s when there weren't many other options, and it was rapidly propagated because US antitrust laws forced AT&T to inexpensively license Unix (and by extension C) to universities and research institutions.

That was half a century ago.

I am a supporter of Rust adoption, but the line of reasoning that "C didn't need X, so Rust shouldn't either" is fundamentally flawed.

The time difference between today and C's public emergence is the same as the time between C's emergence and the 1920s. The field of computing is radically different today and any language that wishes to see wider adoption now must play by a completely different set of rules than those of 50 years ago.

budgefrankly|26 days ago

> changes too fast

The core language has been static for ages, and breaking changes are handled by the edition system so you can use a modern compiler to build code on old syntax. Since the 1.0 release ten years ago there have been four editions.

It's absolutely not changing too fast

> depends on third party libraries that change faster than I can breath

No it doesn't. The standard library is already sufficient for a lot of work; and there is an unhosted version with a "core" version of that standard library which has zero dependencies.

Modern Rust, Java, Python, TypeScript etc. developers choose to use a lot of third party libraries; but that's only because the tooling and ecosystem are both good enough to facilitate that. Nothing about the language forces it.

johnny22|26 days ago

the proof is right there in all the discussion about rust in the linux kernel too.