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I mean, the person reverse-engineering the Mac M1 GPU and building a Linux driver for it is doing so in Rust. I don’t know how much more bare-metal you can get than that.
Rust isn’t about gaining safety by being far from the hardware, the way memory managed languages with runtimes are; it’s about giving the systems programmer a mental model that actually has some degree of engineering sense behind it. You seem to have the impression that C++’s danger is what makes it an appealing tool, but the danger is to the user not accomplishing their intended goal, not to an enemy: it’s a kitchen knife which is all blade and no handle. Moar blaDe doesn’t make the knife better at cutting food into sizes and shapes you want for your sandwich.
And disdain for C++ long predates Rust. If you need to copy your opinions from someone high-status, I’ll defer to Linus Torvalds on the matter.
While I do find the fanaticism around Rust offputting, especially considering how gay it is, the language itself is actually grounded in a better theoretical foundation than its legacy competitors.
You know, this reminds me of another thing I immediately hated about Rust. They took unions and renamed them enums.
Now in fairness, I've worked in probably over a dozen codebases across 20 years and never once organically encountered anyone using a union. I've never encountered an API that uses unions as their preferred input or output types. It's a language feature I'm aware of, but in my professional and hobbyist work in C, C++, C#, Java, Python (ugh), Javescript (hurk) or anything I've forgotten, I've never seen them actually used. So if Rust wants to pull a fast one on people who slept through that day of class and never learned about a union, and pretend it's a fancy new enum they came up with. whatever. I even think it's kind of clever how they use them and really made them a core part of the language.
But it's also just so fucking presumptuous, to take two pretty well established language features, and mix them up. I tried to google a little, like, have other more modern languages been doing this for a while? All those dorky functional languages nobody does any actual professional work in? I didn't turn up shit. Seems Rust might be the first language to take unions and pretend they are enums. I mean, whatever, it's not hard, it doesn't stop me. I just hate it.
Rust does have normal C++-style unions, though they're a late and fairly controversial addition for the reasons you mention. I'll admit that I've used them occasionally in internal code (especially networking or protocol development, where hardware developers love throwing in 'this next four bytes could be an int or a float' in rev 1.0.1a after you've built your entire reader around structs), but I'd probably ask anyone who used them as an input in an API what they were smoking.
In higher-abstraction languages than C++, that sorta behavior either isn't available and/or forgo the performance and memory-specific benefits for dumb-programmer-safety. TypeScript unions or Java sealed interfaces are doing the same thing at the level of a definition -- it's a field you can put any of a limited number of options in! -- and you'd absolutely never use them for overlapping purposes. On the other hand, C#'s even more limited than Java on that use case, and I come across places it'd make sense to use pretty regularly, so maybe I'm just bitching.
That may be why a lot of their more type-theory focused stuff fell under a different name than the TypeScript-style union types.
I think the Rust enum overload is downstream of a lot of the behaviors you'll see in Java or Kotlin; I've encouraged FIRST students to use similar designs to hold different configuration values for easy toggling of modes or states. Not sure who first made enums that broke from the C(++) limit of one-value-per, but given the amount of C++ code I've seen where enums were used to map various flags intended for bitwise addition, probably a pretty early one.
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Mixing up enums and unions? Not that I know of. Repurposing perfectly well-defined words in misleadingly confusing ways? Since before I was born, including with the most basic building blocks of code, by calling subroutines "functions". Maybe they'd never thought hard enough about side effects or imagined things like memoization, but at the very least they should have gotten the "a function is a rule that assigns to each input exactly one output" lecture by grade 8.
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I'm annoyed at Rust for the same reason in the opposite direction. They added sum types, knew they added sum types, but called them "enums" - why?
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Something every single functional language has, technically correctly, claimed.
There is a reason why functional languages are created- usually an obsession with safety and mathematical purity over all else; that reason is also inextricably linked to why every other language just takes the parts of those languages that enhance one's ability to reason imperatively about the code and leaves the rest.
Inbuilt disdain of "computer says no because reasons" not enough? But then, that depends on thinking that "shipping product that works well enough" is more important than "mathematically correct, but your competition beat you to market by a month", and because Rust is developed by those who emphasize the latter, and not the former, it's going to make compromises in development speed for that safety (which is why everyone tends to bitch about the borrow checker).
Rust is not a replacement for C++. Rust is a replacement for Ada.
What exactly are you arguing against here? Error messages at compile time? There’s plenty of interpreted languages that crash at runtime if that floats your boat.
Presumably, such people enjoy removing the annoying "check engine" light and just waiting for their engine to start smoking.
I don’t believe this is even a real dichotomy, at least in the Rust vs mainstream language sense. (Obviously if you’re formalising something in Lean4, that’s going to be comically inefficient compared to just building it, but that’s so far from the Rust vs C++ land it’s not even relevant.) The reason companies are fond of mainstream languages has nothing to do with engineering, it has to do with the availability of replacement labor. It doesn’t matter what technical properties the mainstream language has; what matters is that it’s mainstream.
I’m going to out myself as much crazier than anyone may have expected, but: the borrow checker is the least-inspired part of Rust and the language would be better without it entirely. The reasons Rust is good are because it actually has sane primitive types, non-ambiguous syntax, algebraic data types, parametric polymorphism, a non-busted standard library, and perhaps most importantly: cargo.
The borrow checker paradigm is basically a half-baked bastardization of linear types, and the way it’s done has some serious theoretical deficiencies that basically mandate leaky abstractions. But I’m not going to babble about that here.
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Yeah the Rust community is... not a great place. It tends to be very politicized and hostile to anyone who doesn't like that. And as you said, there's a weirdly high occurrence of trans people and furries who make that front and center of their programming blogs. No idea what that's about, but as someone who just wants to program I kinda hate the community. But the language is good even if the community is off-putting.
This is also why I haven't gone into LLMs, except instead of the community it's the models themselves that are gay (or you need to spend hours figuring out which ones have had the gayness removed).
It's because they're not programmers, they're math people who just happen to express that through programming (which is why they don't fully understand the "no backtalk from my machines" programmer mindset). These are the academic, math -> programming as end types rather than the programming-as-means/[software] engineer types (who tend to be natively compatible with imperative languages).
You can usually tell if a language was made by these sorts of people if it's a.) a functional-first language (where it's both mathematically pure and hence completely fucking useless), or b.) uses the penis operator ":=" to declare variables. These guys also tend to really love Vim for the same reason.
R1 is not gay and will readily roleplay as literally Hitler if you jailbreak it. admittedly it's a bit harder now since they removed the web search but should be still doable.
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