>a crashed program is a crashed program whether I dereferenced a null pointer or was poking around in a slice with multi-byte Unicode characters in it
Most of the biggest advances in software engineering are because of increased modularity. One of the best traditional ways to increase modularity is the ability to define and call functions. But any isolation between these "function" modules is only possible if you can at least factor out things into a function mechanically without introducing crashes (for example because of memory unsafety--modularity would fly out of the window right there).
>Rust is cool for so many great reasons that get talked about so little because everyone seems too busy acting superior about memory safety. Talk about traits! Or Cargo! Or the cool async stuff! Anything but another lecture on memory safety.
It's better not to dilute the message. All these other things are nice-to-have gimmicks. But the memory safety is a game-changer. It does no good to advertise 230 features at the same time. No one will remember. Advertise the killer feature. And that's the lifetime stuff, which gives you memory AND THREAD safety.
Rust's thread safety only applies to the special case of those threads accessing in process data segments.
Rust's type system can do very little to help when those threads are accessing the same record on a database without transactions, OS IPC on shared memory, manipulating files without locks, handling hardware signals, handling duplicate RPC calls,...
Yeah but that ultimately requires an unsafe block, kind of true, except no one reads the code of all crates they depend on, and the direct dependencies might be safe in what concerns the direct consumers.
This is a point that you constantly bring up in these threads, do you think most developers believe that data race safety should extend beyond the bounds of the process?
One thing that Rust’s type system does allow you to do is define a consistent manner in which to access external systems, even add types that will mimic the same safety. Is it perfect? Will it protect you from a different process working against the DB? Will it enforce things in the other process? No. But will it give you higher level semantics to be able to construct a better model for operating against that external system? Yes.
This has been a recurring theme from you, but in the cases you're describing the risk is only a race condition (no general solution is possible) and not a data race (which safe Rust is able to deny by design). These are categorically different problems.
People have to consider race conditions anyway, they're part of our world. For example if you use git's ordinary --force to overwrite certain changes that's subject to a TOCTOU race, which is why force-with-lease exists. Even in the real world, I once opened a bedroom window to throw a spider out onto the garden below and a different spider came in through the window in the brief interval while it was open - exploiting the "open window to throw out spider" race opportunity.
Data race isn't just "Oh it's just a race condition" or Rust wouldn't care, data races destroy Sequential Consistency. And humans need sequential consistency to reason about the behaviour of non-trivial programs. So, without this writing concurrent software is a nightmare. Hence, "fearless concurrency".
You won't destroy sequential consistency by having non-transactional SQL queries. Try it.
I have tried plenty of times, and seen not so happy train travelers with the same ticket for the same place on the same train, hence why bring it up all the time.
It is obvious it is a subject that is irrelevant in the Rust community.
Who needs consistency in distributed systems when multiple threads from the same process are accessing the same external data without coordination.
Programmers do. Programmers are human and so can't reason about the behaviour of non-trivial programs without sequential consistency.
If I was trying to debug software which sometimes mistakenly issues people duplicate tickets, I think I'd want to be able to reason about how the software works, and that's not going to be possible if it doesn't even exhibit sequential consistency.
Er, no? Sequential consistency isn't some Rust invention, Leslie Lamport (yes the LaTeX one) invented it for his 1979 paper "How to Make a Multiprocessor Computer That Correctly Executes Multiprocess Programs"
I rather like Lamport's last observation about what happens if you don't have sequential consistency and instead your programs just put up with whatever was cheap/ efficient to implement (as will happen by default on a modern multi-core CPU): "verifying their correctness becomes a monumental task"
It was later proved that it's not merely "monumental" this is actually an undecidable problem in general which explains why humans aren't good at it.
So, this is important in principle to get right, and (safe) Rust does so. You are of course welcome to decide you don't care, why aim to write correct programs anyway? And for now at least it seems in our industry many people agree.
While deadlock is undesirable, this is still behaviour which you can (and the author did) successfully reason about. You still have your consistent model of the world, in which you are deadlocked and can see exactly why.
"Fearless concurrency" isn't "It's impossible to make mistakes" it's only "The mistakes are no scarier than they were in your conventional non-concurrent program".
>Why do people say things like: "It's better not to dilute the message"?
>Better for who?
Better for everyone.
When talking about a new thing, it would be really silly to emphasize how nice the logo is, how nice the package it comes in is, look at the awesome tape the box is closed with etc. If I turn the product off it even turns off! Look at the nice rounded corners of the device!
It even can do async! Just like Javascript and .NET.
Who cares!
What is the main strength of the tool, the pain point it was made to eliminate? Lead with that.
> That's sales/marketing language, not engineering language.
Leading with the actual technical novelty that actually advances the state of the art in production compilers is marketing? Well, I guess it's good marketing in a way.
The user will find cargo on their own in 5 minutes.
I mean "message" how you want, HN is hosted in a free country.
But N=1 for you: as a serious polyglot user of Rust who knows it well and uses it all the time: this shit is a huge turnoff. It's a programming language. On a long enough timeline all the motivated hackers will end up knowing many programming languages well, they all have pros and cons.
Trying to boil important engineering decisions down to a tweet so that we can stay "on message" comes off like something someone would do if they were selling books or training or consulting services attached to a technology, which a priori gives them an agenda other than giving good advice.
So to keep it short: help people pick the right tool for the job without an agenda.
I think you have a point. Rust is primarily focused on being a systems language, and memory safety is the killer feature it brings to the table in that domain. But we know that Rust is being used in areas where its qualities as a systems language are less important.
Why, for example, would a Python developer pick up Rust? Probably because of the really strict typing addressing a major pain point for most Python developers and the trait system being somewhat analogous to Protocols, which any Python developer who has chafed with the dynamic typing is almost certainly already familiar with. With good library support for interfacing between the two, it's a more natural coupling than most people would think on the face of it.
That said, while I don't think a Python developer reaches for Rust because of memory safety, I do think it's still an important factor as it provides the guard rails that make it so someone who has primarily used a GC language and not had to concern themselves as much with managing memory can start using Rust knowing that the compiler is not going to let them accidentally shoot them in the foot when it comes to memory management.
Rust is a programming language. It’s the right tool for the job of programming. It happens to have a lot of features that make it a very good programming language.
I think you’re wrong about the language and community, though. It’s killer feature is it’s safety, be it memory, data race, or type. These are the reasons I was interested in learning the language. The fact that the tools make that easier is why I was able to struggle through the new concepts and actually be able to build useful things with it.
If the fact that people enjoy something as a general community turns you off, that’s not the community’s problem.
rustc rejects the resulting program if you mechanically factor out a function accessing &mut self, into a function holding mutable borrows to half the fields calling another function which access the other half of fields (or vice versa, the caller holding &field calling a method mutating other fields). This requires the more complex transformation of passing individual fields into the subfunction (more work, but sometimes easier to read), or waiting for Rust to add partial borrows. Note I've never actually hit this case myself, though I've heard it's an issue people run into.
Most of the biggest advances in software engineering are because of increased modularity. One of the best traditional ways to increase modularity is the ability to define and call functions. But any isolation between these "function" modules is only possible if you can at least factor out things into a function mechanically without introducing crashes (for example because of memory unsafety--modularity would fly out of the window right there).
>Rust is cool for so many great reasons that get talked about so little because everyone seems too busy acting superior about memory safety. Talk about traits! Or Cargo! Or the cool async stuff! Anything but another lecture on memory safety.
It's better not to dilute the message. All these other things are nice-to-have gimmicks. But the memory safety is a game-changer. It does no good to advertise 230 features at the same time. No one will remember. Advertise the killer feature. And that's the lifetime stuff, which gives you memory AND THREAD safety.