>helps that a 10kloc c program getting riir'd probably won't be a 10kloc rust program, because c doesn't have libraries and rust does.

What? Rust has so few libraries of significance that it still depends on C for security-critical areas like SSL.

>it is literally impossible to write "a small codebase focused on its key value-adds without distractions" in a language that doesn't have strings and requires you to build a dictionary from scratch

Strings are misunderstood, I'm not going to get into it here. My dictionaries in C usually clock in at about two dozen lines of code. The complexity doesn't go away because your language does it for you.

Having written dictionary implementations in C, I would be very interested in seeing your implementation that fits in two dozen lines of code.

Threw together an example (untested, with obvious errors) to give you an idea of what it could look like:

https://paste.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/3122d4a27a8e5312462e2329bf7ed6...

Actually managed to get it to exactly 2 dozen lines of code, not including the header, which isn't bad for an off-the-cuff remark.

You'd naturally expand or shrink this with whatever subset of map functions you require, like key/value enumeration, object deletion, resizing, whatever. It depends on your use-case. I don't believe in generic code.

Ok, that makes more sense. I was considering a slightly more fully-featured table and including the header (see: https://gist.github.com/saagarjha/00faa1963023206a8ccd987798...) and I was a couple times larger than your number, so I was trying to figure out what you were doing that I was unable to replicate…

that's not true these days, rustls is a great TLS lib that has been through at least one serious external security audit.

https://cure53.de/pentest-report_rustls.pdf

For what it's worth, rustls relies on ring which has primitives written in C and ASM because getting constant-time operation guarantees from Rust is Very Hard. Though progress is being made on this area.