Re:Why is Rust difficult?
by jchw on Monday January 22, 2018 @10:10AM
(#16204856)
>You make some good points but I think it's incorrect to compare Rust & Go. Rust is a systems programming language. It competes with C/C++ more than other high-level languages. In fact, while Go was originally positioned as a systems language but it ended up attracting people from scripting languages like Python because its performance characteristics put it there. You'd probably never bother building a serious web browser in Go, but you would (& Mozilla is) in Rust.
I'm only comparing Rust and Go where they overlap. For example, Rust webservers versus Go webservers. There are other languages that may overlap different parts of Rust, such as in fact, Ruby and Python.
Go and Rust are both more general than the languages people compare them to. Both have C interop of various levels. Both allow unsafe code that touches memory directly. Both are high performance, relatively low level, and both provide some level of memory safety (though, Go provides much less.) I think they overlap a whole lot more than people think.
>In terms of correctness, I've never heard claims about improving security issues, except in so far as those caused by memory/concurrency - think of it as necessary but not sufficient for security. This "limited" class of bugs is responsible for quite a large number of runtime issues & they can be frustratingly difficult to find/fix (+ be confident that you did actually fix it). It's hard to say how much better things will play out in real-world software development as at some fundamental point there are always unsafe calls which weakens the guarantees Rust can make (but does put an explicit boundary on where you should go looking for bugs).
Well, I personally would claim it helps a lot of security and crash issues. Buffer overflows, use-after-frees, race conditions, and more. Also, most people do not overstate the safety of Rust, but beginners frequently misunderstand it. This is because people often list the benefits without listing the caveats.
I'm only comparing Rust and Go where they overlap. For example, Rust webservers versus Go webservers. There are other languages that may overlap different parts of Rust, such as in fact, Ruby and Python.
Go and Rust are both more general than the languages people compare them to. Both have C interop of various levels. Both allow unsafe code that touches memory directly. Both are high performance, relatively low level, and both provide some level of memory safety (though, Go provides much less.) I think they overlap a whole lot more than people think.
>In terms of correctness, I've never heard claims about improving security issues, except in so far as those caused by memory/concurrency - think of it as necessary but not sufficient for security. This "limited" class of bugs is responsible for quite a large number of runtime issues & they can be frustratingly difficult to find/fix (+ be confident that you did actually fix it). It's hard to say how much better things will play out in real-world software development as at some fundamental point there are always unsafe calls which weakens the guarantees Rust can make (but does put an explicit boundary on where you should go looking for bugs).
Well, I personally would claim it helps a lot of security and crash issues. Buffer overflows, use-after-frees, race conditions, and more. Also, most people do not overstate the safety of Rust, but beginners frequently misunderstand it. This is because people often list the benefits without listing the caveats.