Brodie Robertson
Feel free to borrow my litmus test for whether you should ever pay attention to someones opinion on programming:
Just ask them if memory safety is some special thing that Rust does, if the answer is yes feel free to disregard everything they say following that
Brodie Robertson
For the non programmers out there, what makes Rust special has nothing to do with it being memory safe, in fact basically every language people actually use is memory safe with the exception of C, C++ and Assembly
hacknorris
@BrodieOnLinux smh reently i dig deeper and i checked all the three… oops >_<
Brodie Robertson
@mcepl Sure the method of memory safety might be special, but the property of memory safety itself isn't, understanding that distinction is important.
Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦
Well, it is a special (although probably not unique) that it is memory safe without giving in to garbage collection. So, Rust fangirls and fanboys are at least partially right, but partially right is the worst kind of right.
Brodie Robertson
@Rataunderground Memory safety with the borrow checker, rather than through garbage collection
Ulises ⁂ /I\
@BrodieOnLinux So... Whats special then about rust?
Brodie Robertson
@Rataunderground There's a lot more to it than that but I don't want to write out an essay when people much smarter than me have done some great explanations on the topic
Ulises ⁂ /I\
@BrodieOnLinux Thanks :)
Brodie Robertson
@GolfNovemberUniform Yes, but you can basically just write C in C++
GolfNovemberUniform
@BrodieOnLinux isn't C++ safe too if a certain feature is not used?
Fabio Valentini
@BrodieOnLinux if you count thread safety too (Rust does), then Go, Java, and Python are not entirely "safe" either (but apparently the latest Swift is)
Brodie Robertson
@decathorpe I think it just makes more sense to talk about thread safety and memory safety as 2 separate topics so that everyone is on the same page
Brodie Robertson
@sgued That's true but now you get into the weeds of which memory safety definition you want to work with, you can find discussions of memory safety in both a single and a multi threaded context.
Soso
@BrodieOnLinux Not true actually. Java, Golang and Swift are not memory safe in the context of multi threading. Very few languages with multi threading are memory safe, and Rust is the only one that achieves that without huge caveats.
JavaScript solves that by not having threads, or not allowing to share memory between them (workers). Python solves that through the Global Interpretor Lock, some functional languages solve it by forbidding mutations.
Brodie Robertson
@Geniusak @Rataunderground I do think weeding out thousands of applicants is necessary, it's just a matter of how you do so. As an example if you're hiring a C# developer and they can't write hello world unprompted then they shouldn't even be anywhere near the job. If you instead say "I can just see that you're not qualified" based on nothing, now you have a problem.
Geniusak
@BrodieOnLinux @Rataunderground see I would answer yes to the original partial question. Just because it's without a gc doesn't mean the original statement is false, at least is casual conversation
Using this as a litmus test makes you sound like all those tech recruiters with arbitrary and insane standards to help you weed out the thousands of applicants
Brodie Robertson
@faassen @Rataunderground That's just arguing linguistics, it has nothing to do with the property of being memory safe, it's the way it handles memory safety
Martijn Faassen
> what makes Rust special has nothing to do with it being memory safe
> Memory safety with the borrow checker, rather than through garbage collection
Um. "Nothing to do" is demonstrably too strong in your own words
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