Hacker News Reader

Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

The only flaw in the original paper was the inclusion of "Rust" as a safe language. Anyone who understands what it really does knows that you can indeed write unsafe code in Rust, unlike Java for example. Rust makes it easier to write safe code, but doesn't prevent unsafe code to be written, which puts it back in the category that should be avoided by the masses.

Moreover, Rust is extremely complex, similar or worse than C++. A programmer has to learn a lot of alien concepts that they don't need when using Java, Go, or similar safe languages.

View on HN

Rust is absolutely a safe language, and in more ways than just memory safety. The only way to get unsafe code in rust is to opt in to unsafety with a keyword that can easily be checked for, so that you can decide for yourself to enforce that no code in your project uses it.

And unless you are writing a few specific types of code, using unsafe usually isn't ever necessary at all.

The complexity is also very much not an issue in practice. If you rub up against complexity in C++, you might not even know it. UB could be silently ruining things. If you rub up against complexity in rust, you were either just saved from yourself, or you are hitting part of the language that is probably undergoing improvement. But you never have to worry about complexity silently making things worse.

> complexity is also very much not an issue in practice.

In practice, people find otherwise. It takes a steep learning curve to use Rust compared to Java, for example.

We're comparing rust to c++ in this thread. There are simpler languages than both out there, sure, but that's not really relevant here.

No, the comparison is against languages considered "safe" like Java, Go, Swift, and Rubi.

"Moreover, Rust is extremely complex, similar or worse than C++"

That's my point, if Rust is as complex as C++, it is not a good choice compared to the other languages.

In fact, many people still avoid C++ and use C exactly for this same issue, C++ is too complex to use. These people who use C will justifiably have the same argument against Rust, it is too complex, and migrate when needed to something else like Go.

If a less complex language meets your requirements, by all means use it. But I still have no idea how that is relevant here. C doesn't give you safety and less complex languages don't give you performance and control. That's why comparing rust to c++ is useful.

But the way I think the higher complexity of rust over c is also not a big deal in practice, for much the same reason as I gave for rust vs c++. But that is also irrelevant here.

It's also super easy to enforce at the crate level with #![forbid(unsafe_code)] if you feel so inclined - no manual checks necessary

Reply on news.ycombinator.com