Comment by FieryTransition | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FieryTransition | Hacker News Reader

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FieryTransition

No language will save you from: - A lack of knowledge about the domain, this includes the technical framework in which your program exists, behaves and interacts - Code errors which result in valid code, but does the wrong thing, Rust isn't magic - Bad choice of datastructures and algorithms - Incomprihensible code documentation and bad development practices.

While I get that languages can eliminate a type of problem, they don't eliminate badly written software. Most of the time, the software development process itself, is more important, if you really want to examine what it means to build secure/safe software.

Having a team dedicated to developing software safely and using a language with stronger type safety guarantees vs. having a person just build something with the same language, does not magically imbue the end product with good qualities.

Take your example, if you don't have a good foundation in distributed systems, and try to build a distributed system in Erlang, you will only get so far, before you hit your head against the wall so hard, you start studying distributed systems instead.

This kind of thinking is strange. It's similar to saying no type of exercise can save you from death. While true, we are talking about probability bounds here, not certainties.

I totally understand what you are saying, in terms of probabilities, but what I'm arguing against, is thinking that safety, robustness etc. for a program is just a given, just because you happen to use Rust or whatever else is claiming X feature. In it's essence, it's like saying something is made of military grade materials, but then the materials are used all wrong in the actual design or not of importance at all. The fact that someone used Rust, does not really tell me much, other than certain types of errors are eliminated, and that is assuming they used Rust correctly, for the type system to work properly.

If you ask people explicitly about whether Rust just makes better products, they might say that they have doubts, or give a vague answer. But asking like this is just a leading question, and therefore the process itself of asking the question, will probably cast doubt over some automatic assumptions about what the type safetly of Rust really does for the end product.

But the reality is, "Made with Rust" is starting to look like a certificate/claim of validity, and its definitely not, just like any other language isn't either.

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