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Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust?

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In article <1067o6p$24rjd$2@dont-email.me>,
Julio Di Egidio  <julio@diegidio.name> wrote:
>On 28/07/2025 13:37, Dan Cross wrote:
>
>> 50 years of empirical evidence has shown that, sadly, this is
>> just not true.  Even our best and brightest C programmers still
>> regularly make mistakes that simply impossible to represent in
>> Rust, along with other languages.
>
>Conversely, that are things that cannot be represented in (e.g.)
>Rust,

I'm not sure what this means.  It is true that valid Rust
programs are not allowed to violate it's rules about, say,
memory aliasing, which means that some kinds of data structures
are difficult (or impossible) to represent using references (for
instance, circular lists using intrusive pointers).  But that
doesn't mean that those programs, or programs that are
substantially equivalent, cannot be written.

For the circular list example, one could use raw pointers, and
Rust will be perfectly happy with this: the tradeoff is that the
onus shifts to the programmer to ensure that the program doesn't
violate the language's rules.  But that's really no different
than the C case.

But more often than not, it turns out that using a different
data structure may actually be better anyway.  A lot of people
who look at Rust and dismiss it because it's difficult to
implement something like an intrusive doubly linked list are
just trying to do that because that's the data structure they
are most familiar with, and not really considering whether it's
a good fit for the problem at hand or not.  It may be that Rust
already gives you something that solves the problem, and may be
more efficient to boot.

>plus the bugs are still potentially there, just now in the
>Rust compiler and runtime itself...

Rust doesn't really have a runtime, per se.  You give it a stack
and jump to an entry point, and you're pretty much done; sure,
there's a standard library, but that's different than (say) a
managed language with a garbage collector etc.

>IOW, the idea that programmers in general need to be baby-seated

I wouldn't phrase it as "babysitting".  Rather, it's
professionals making conscious choices about their tools to most
effectively do their jobs.

>instead of given control I find not just self-defeating but really
>fallacious.

In what way do you feel you have less control (and over what?)
in Rust than in, say, C?

I find this line of reasoning both odd, and based on a logical
fallacy unsupported by empirical evidence: specifically, it is
not the case that just because something _can_ happen, that it
_will_ happen, let alone at the same rate as other things that
are known to happen regularly.

Yes, there is always the possibility that bugs exist in a
compiler or library.  But a) those tend to be rare compared to
bugs introduced by programmers in any given system, and b) the
toolset and library for a language is a much smaller surface
area than the aggregate of all programs that use that toolset
and library.  That is, taken together, there is much, much more
source code written in a language out in the world than there is
in a compiler and library for that language.  Also, because the
compiler and standard library for a language are used so
heavily, bugs in them tend to be noticed and addressed quickly.

But beyond that, if the position you have presented is true,
there should be data that supports it, and there's not.  Rust
has been used in production systems now for about 10 years;
there's plenty of code out there written in it, in a bunch of
different domains from embedded firmware to web services and
user applications, and the available data suggests that it _is_
a win in those domains; not just in safety or reduced defect
rates, but even in performance of generated code and
productivity.  For example, here's a presentation from Google
engineering director Lars Bergstrom about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrrH2lcl9ew
And here's post from the Android security team about memory
safety that talks about wins from Rust:
https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html

Does this mean that the language is perfect, and will prevent
all bugs?  No, of course not; it's not magic.  But this line of
reasoning that says, "well, you can still have bugs, so what's
the point?" inevitably ignores the relative rate of those bugs
between languages, which does matter.  It's the same argument
that says, "you can still die in a car crash, so we don't need
seatbelts or airbags."  Yet all available data shows that those
things _do_ in fact save lives.

	- Dan C.

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Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-03-10 07:46 -0400
  Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com> - 2025-03-10 07:14 -0700
    Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Richard Harnden <richard.nospam@gmail.invalid> - 2025-03-10 16:42 +0000
      Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2025-06-18 02:51 -0400
        Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-07-28 11:37 +0000
          Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Julio Di Egidio <julio@diegidio.name> - 2025-07-28 13:50 +0200
            Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-07-28 15:16 +0000
              Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Julio Di Egidio <julio@diegidio.name> - 2025-07-28 17:59 +0200
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-07-28 22:18 +0000
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Julio Di Egidio <julio@diegidio.name> - 2025-07-29 10:18 +0200
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-07-29 12:16 +0000
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2025-07-29 17:37 +0200
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Julio Di Egidio <julio@diegidio.name> - 2025-07-29 18:24 +0200
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Julio Di Egidio <julio@diegidio.name> - 2025-07-29 19:14 +0200
                Rust vs Hype (was Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust?) cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-07-29 18:27 +0000
                Re: Rust vs Hype (was Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust?) David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2025-08-02 17:47 +0200
                Re: Rust vs Hype (was Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust?) cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-08-04 22:33 +0000
                Re: Rust vs Hype (was Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust?) David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2025-08-06 18:38 +0200
                Re: Rust vs Hype (was Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust?) cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-08-08 03:30 +0000
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Julio Di Egidio <julio@diegidio.name> - 2025-07-30 19:08 +0200
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-07-30 18:00 +0000
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Julio Di Egidio <julio@diegidio.name> - 2025-07-30 20:34 +0200
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-07-30 18:40 +0000
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Julio Di Egidio <julio@diegidio.name> - 2025-07-30 20:51 +0200
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-07-30 18:53 +0000
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Julio Di Egidio <julio@diegidio.name> - 2025-09-05 10:59 +0200
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Julio Di Egidio <julio@diegidio.name> - 2025-08-03 17:55 +0200
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Julio Di Egidio <julio@diegidio.name> - 2025-08-03 18:17 +0200
              Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2025-07-29 06:24 +0100
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-07-29 12:27 +0000
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2025-07-30 07:44 +0100
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-07-30 11:30 +0000
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> - 2025-07-30 16:51 +0100
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-07-30 18:00 +0000
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2025-08-02 18:41 +0200
                Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) - 2025-08-04 22:34 +0000
  Re: Informal discussion: comp.lang.rust? Kaz Kylheku <643-408-1753@kylheku.com> - 2025-03-10 17:35 -0400

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