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Comment by cohani | Hacker News Reader

Focusing narrowly on memory safety is frequently a distraction that incompetent developers use to excuse their buggy code. "Sure, my Rust code might cause deaths and cause millions of dollars lost; and my code might be unsafe, insecure and incorrect; but at least my code is memory safe and easy to debug when I fuck it up!". And then it often turns out that Rust is not memory safe in practice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49697392

The real value of Rust is likely pattern matching and tagged unions. Apart from modules/packages that are not a disaster, like Gabriel Dos Reis the saboteur's disaster with modules in C++.

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Were you intentionally rude with your first sentence or just unaware?

> And then it often turns out that Rust is not memory safe in practice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49697392

For what it's worth, in that specific instance there's no memory safety issue since Rust is guaranteed to crash on stack overflow on Ubuntu (and probably other supported Linux distros)

For what it's worth, this is not only that specific instance. Rust might not be memory safe in theory, but when talking about "in practice" - there is profound evidence that Rust's memory safety works.

this argument is so stupid, yes rust doesn't prevent all bugs but eliminating a large proportion of them is very obviously a good thing.

Indeed! They shrug it off when you ask them about supply chain safety or compiler complexity. I opine that post 1.0 they wasted precious engineering time trying to placate nodejs webshits over building the best systems language.

    There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

        — C.A.R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture

What would you have preferred the devs work on instead?

i suppose a supply chain that doesn't exist is pretty secure.

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