Re:Memory Safe Languages in Android 13
by estebank on Thursday December 01, 2022 @05:13PM
(#33823692)
panics can be caught and the presence of those unwraps come with enough data that filing a bug report upstream is helpful enough to fix the bug.
Sure, but that (we do it) happens currently with C/C++ and signal handler traps which gather the callstack and collate them: the issue isn't usually that we don't know the crashes aren't happening or having the call stacks - the issue is hacky code that was written for one purpose is now being used for other things it wasn't designed for (because it is useful to artists, despite its limitations), and there isn't the time to go back and write it properly for the new expanded use-case. That's my point: a new safer language isn't going to improve much in this area without more development time provided to write better code, given the time constraints are going to be the same as they are currently.
But anyway, in my experience a lot of the crashes are often due to quickly hacked together plugins for the various DCCs written for artists, that don't have good error checking or testing, and it's not completely clear to me how that situation's going to improve that much with something like Rust, if the same programmer time constraints are going to exist in writing them: i.e. I think it's very likely people will just unwrap() their way to getting things to compile instead of correctly handling errors, so it will be the same situation from the artists' perspective: technically it may be a panic rather than a segfault, but from the artists' perspective, it will likely be identical and take the DCC down.