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A comment on Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 automatic updates. Parent comment

Re:Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 aut... by kybernetyk on Friday October 24, 2025 @01:54AM (#45691269)
I think Rust speaks to people who don't "play" with their code during development. Moving stuff around, commenting things out, etc. When I try to do this in Rust, the borrow checker instantly complains because $something violates $some_rule. I can't say "yeah I know but just for now let's try it out this way and if it works I'll do it right".

I work this way and that's why I consider Rust to be a major impediment to my productivity. Same goes for Python with its significant whitespace which prevents freely moving code around and swapping code blocks, etc.

I guess there are people who plan everything in their mind and the coding part is just typing out their ideas (instead of developing their ideas during code editing).

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Re:Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 aut... by whytevuhuni on Friday October 24, 2025 @02:31AM (#45691515)
That might be true. In my case, it is precisely because I do play a lot with my code, doing big 2-day refactors sometimes too. With Rust, when it finally compiles, it very often tends to run without crashing, and often correctly too, saving me a lot of debugging.

But it's also because of all the things I'm forced to fix while implementing or refactoring, that I would've been convinced were correct. And I was proven wrong by the compiler, so, many, times, that I've lost all confidence in my own ability to do it correctly without this kind of help. It helped me out of my naivety that "C is simple".

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Re:Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 aut... by maxbond on Friday October 24, 2025 @04:42AM (#45692368)
> I guess there are people who plan everything in their mind and the coding part is just typing out their ideas (instead of developing their ideas during code editing).

I don't think there are, I think Gall's law that all complex systems evolve from simpler systems applies.

I play with code when I program with Rust. It just looks slightly different. I deliberately trigger errors and then read the error message. I copy code into scratch files. I'm not very clever; I can't plan out a nontrivial program without feedback from experiments.

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Re:Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 aut... by heavyset_go on Friday October 24, 2025 @05:10AM (#45692541)
You eventually don't even think about the borrow checker, writing compiling code becomes second nature, and it also has the side effect of encouraging good habits in other languages.
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