Comment by vlovich123

Comment by vlovich123 14 hours ago

The long run has already spoken. Go look at the reports out of Microsoft and Android. It’s screamingly clear that the philosophy of Rust that most code can be written in safe with small bits in unsafe is inherently safer. The defect rate plummets by one or two orders of magnitude if I recall correctly. C is an absolute failure (since it’s the baseline) and Zig has no similar adoption studies. You could argue it will be similar if you always compile releasesafe, but then performance will be worse than C or Rust due to all the checks and it’s unclear how big a while the places that aren’t dynamically checked are.

Oh and of course rust is inherently slightly faster because no reference aliasing is allowed and automatically annotated everywhere which allows for significant aggressive compiler optimizations that neither C nor Zig can do automatically and is risky to do by hand.

AndyKelley 4 hours ago

Microsoft and Google are on the Rust Foundation board:

https://rustfoundation.org/about/

They benefit by having more of the industry using technologies they control.

Studies from independent third parties would be less biased.

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vlovich123 39 minutes ago

More FUD and guilt by association. Microsoft and Google are also major contributors to the C and C++ standards bodies. Microsoft also has C# and Google has Kotlin. I think claiming they control Rust is weak given the community organization structure within the project and claiming the studies are inherently biased because they provide some funding is exceedingly weak.
IMHO the onus is on you to present any contrary studies showing Rust's safety profile isn't as good as the studies indicate when compared with C++ or to demonstrate where Zig's safety profile in real world complex environments stacks up.
We can disagree on opinions, but you can't discard all experimental evidence in favor of no evidence, especially when the safety profile of Rust is backed by solid theoretical models as to why it would be safer.
To that point, AWS and Cloudflare have also adopted the Rust language for all new projects. I think that says something about the recognition that it really is much harder to write trivial memory vulnerabilities.

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uecker 9 hours ago

I don't put too much wait on the self-reporting by Microsoft or Google. I agree though that the strategy to write safe bits and abstractions is good. What I know not to be true is the idea that similar strategies would not work also in C.

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vlovich123 4 hours ago

> What I know not to be true is the idea that similar strategies would not work also in C.
Is your argument that developers at MS and Google haven’t been trying to employ these strategies for existing C codebases? It’s a bold position to take and one I’d say devoid of evidence; all the evidence suggests it’s really hard to reason about ownership in complex systems and abstractions only help you do so error free up to a very limited point.

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