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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

> not sure how Rust helps with that as it won’t solve mismatch between intent and implementation.

It's not rust specific, but any language which allows you to work on a higher level and with better typing helps close that gap. For example for a long time Linux kernel had an issue with marking user/kernel addresses which opened it up to bugs and security issues. In C those are just numbers. In Rust this is moot and correct by default because user addresses are explicitly UserPtr.

So yes, sometimes a better language allows you make some unintended things explicitly not compile. It won't solve the issue completely, but the scope of the mismatch gets much smaller.

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You don’t even understand my point. It’s about specifying what you want to accomplish, the code can be correct and safe and still do the wrong thing, that’s the most relevant bug for a statistics software like SPSS. Almost no one cares about it segfaulting once in a million runs, people do care about it doing the math right. Rust doesn’t help at all with that. Rust isn’t more high level than C or other languages or how is it? Does it know anything about quantiles or student t distributions and will warn the agent if it implements them wrong?

> You don’t even understand my point.

What if you didn't understand the comment?

Full validation of spec to implementation is still close to impossible and nothing that exists today will get us there outside of extremely limited scope. But some language features make the gap just a bit smaller. The less you have to look at details and more at the actual structure, the more you can be sure the implementation matches what you want.

Extreme, unrealistic case: you want to add something to a list of samples - one implementation does list.add(sample), the other inlines all the reference counting, object cloning, memory allocation and possible extension of list over 100 lines. How sure are you that either one of those implements what you want? Now reduce that to more realistic scenarios where C still forces you to either be more verbose or less explicit, while Rust (or any other more expressive language) lets you show exactly what's needed via better features or via types.

> Does it know anything about quantiles or student t distributions and will warn the agent if it implements them wrong?

No, we're not even close to that. But it lets you use stylo and implement `student(PositiveInteger v)`, which you can't achieve in C. So again - nothing can eliminate that gap today, but language features can definitely make it smaller.

Does that actually exist or is it wishful thinking? People keep telling me this but whenever I look at vibecoded Rust projects it’s the worst kind of abstraction mess I have ever seen. This project here isn’t any different and the author is obviously just throwing stuff against the wall to see if anything sticks. What closes the gap is conventions and abstractions the AI can rely on which is why most AI Rust code looks like crap as there’s just too many ways to do things, AI written Python or even JS code is much simpler in comparison. Never seen a good vibe coded Rust code base if you know anything let me know.

It exists minimally in every place that uses Option/Result instead of a value that can be misinterpreted or accidentally ignored. How far further things go depends on the author. Even without asking for much in cases like this https://github.com/storytold/filmcraft/blob/a65d1e97e85aeaec... I can imagine C code having so many issues... (Nonexclusive matching, tagging mistakes, accessible uninitialised memory, etc.)

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