Re:Rust and the Future of Systems Programming [video]
by akiselev on Thursday November 17, 2016 @03:54PM
(#12981454)
> C/C++ or Rust don't guarantee low-latency realtime properties, and introducing tracing GC doesn't guarantee high-latency non-realtime properties.
We completely agree.
> Great, but it doesn't guarantee any properties of code you haven't written, so it still can't achieve the global properties I've been talking about.
How is this any different from C/C++? They do not give you any guarantees that Rust takes away in this regard. Any library that uses Box::new or vec! is exactly the same as a C library that calls malloc/free internally and you can implement the same heap allocation free algorithms in Rust as you can in C/C++.
I don't understand what global properties you expect a low level systems language to guarantee. They definitely can't guarantee that code you haven't written doesn't heap allocate, you have to check that they don't call malloc/free yourself.
The fact that you don't have to tailor anything is precisely the point. Latency is a property of a runtime, not a language. This has been my point all along. C/C++ or Rust don't guarantee low-latency realtime properties, and introducing tracing GC doesn't guarantee high-latency non-realtime properties.
> You know that's what the Drop trait is for, right? All you have to do is add whatever memory management code you'd have (in your C program) into the trait implementation and your memory deallocation will behave exactly as it would in any other low level language.
Great, but it doesn't guarantee any properties of code you haven't written, so it still can't achieve the global properties I've been talking about.