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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I have observed people taking Rust seriously. You need to reexamine your assumptions.

    We have an evolved capability to short-circuit decisions with a rapid emotional evaluation. It means as a species we didn’t die out early [“that’s a lion; I’m a oerson; lions eat people ergo… Agh!” is not a sustainable strategy] - what’s amazing is that we can also apply it to elarned abstract things like an aestetic sense about programming languages. Such instincts aren’t always perfect, but they’re still worth paying attention to. I don’t see a reason not to express that in a blog post, but you can replace it with “this is unergonomic and in some cases imprecise” if you prefer.




  • gedhrel@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    28 days ago

    That seems like a non sequiteur. Did you watch the video? Did you hear what the presenter was asking for? Technical feedback on the API semantics they were describing. A heads-up if breaking changes to those APIs were about to land, so they can update bindings. They were bending over backwards to be accommodating. None of this is the entitled behaviour you describe.


  • gedhrel@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    29 days ago

    It’s what C is for, too.

    The point is that there may be cases already where the type system that rust provides its guarantees off the back of is insufficiently expressive. (I say “may be” because there are ingenious qays to use what it does provide, although nonobvious and not necessarily without cost.) If you’re using unsafe then it’s just an uglier C. I don’t think anyone considers the current state of Rust’s type system to be the be-all and end-all of expressivity.


  • gedhrel@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    29 days ago

    That’s an interesting notion (although it underestimates the effort, I think). Honestly, having machinery to write down contract semantics in a fashion amenable to automated proofs (meaning, does it type-check?) is massively promising; and I’m a dyed-in-the-wool C hacker. I would hope that the public exposure of this bad behaviour causes a few moments of self-reflection.

    I suspect that attempting to chase a moving target of describing C apis with rust is just an avenue for burnout, unless there really is a mechanism for getting fixes back in the other direction, and professional respect flowing in both directions. That would be a massive shame, and an incredible missed opportunity.



  • gedhrel@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    29 days ago

    There are some situations where I can see Rust’s type-ststem potentially being counterproductive. For instance, it may be valid to invert lock order in a chain of operations under some circumstances, and rust might prevent you from expressing that. I grew up with C (from the pre-ANSI days) and while lifetimes and ownership are things that good C devs care about, they are tacit - and the ability to play fast and loose when necessary is great.

    The linux kernel is built on a foundation of these implicit semantics. Some of it is written down, some of it isn’t. I can see why asking “but what does this mean?” can lead to frustrating conversations and overly-qualified answers, but not everyone in that video was hostile to the prospect.