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This is the common arguement used by people defending languages with tons of footguns.

If this is true, why not write everything in C++?

Javscript includes so many footguns that people know are bad (see the billion of examples of different types being added and getting random answers). Every langauge has some difficult parts, pretending that means any amount is fine is crazy. Javascript has earned its reputation.

Thats a good argument in a vacuum. But the world has determined "I was just following orders" is not a good defense.

We know the crimes against humanity are bad and subordinates are guilty if they do them. We don;t just let everyone off free except the head of state.

Not to see that united healtcare (as bad as they are) are anywhere near that, but I am saying that its clear that we, as a society, already hold all people complicit in evil as guilty. Not just the person at the top.

I will admit, there were a lot of people saying ridiculous things about crypto in 2021. Many of those people were very wrong, but still rewarded with bitcoin hitting 100k.

Those same people say it will hit 200k inevitably. I think all their reasoning is wrong, but yet they have been right. Curious what HN's opinons are.

I remember a post on Blind where someone was passionately arguing that if we put house ownership on the blockchain, 2008 wouldn't have happened because a big part of it was not knowing who owned what homes.

Only the CEO or everyone that works there?

Might I suggest a purple logo, since its half Go (blue) and half rust (reddish). Lol

This fills a pretty good niche. There are several backend APIs that I want to use rust for, but ends up adding so much upkeep and complexity to deal with, but Go leaves errors uncaught.

The key (and way easier said then done) is to take a small amount of money out, accept that its likely all going to be gone, and try to milk it slowly so all the free drinks you get are worth the money.

I like in NYC, so achieving the typical cost of drinks is not hard.

I'm pretty sure no company in their right mind today start a new product in C++

I say this as someone who loves rust and zig, but these types of statements make me feel like HN is way out of touch with the industry. New products are constantly made in C++. That doesn't make it good (and i don't think companies building in C++ are making the best choices), but to say that no big tech company is writing any new code in C++ is just not correct. I see this happen every day at my job.

I also would definitely say more C++ code is written every day over C, although I'll say, I am not as familiar with the embedded world, but I know one HFT/Gaming/Robotics firm will have millions of new C++ lines every day.

Yeah agree with this, will be interesting to see.

I assume the more unsafe rust used, the more the CVE numbers will appear like C and C++. People like to say unsafe means "I checked this and this is fine, compiler" and isn't a bad thing but I feel that's inaccurate since the whole point of rust is that people struggle to write safe code even when they are really checking. I feel unsafe rust is way more "I really hope this is right, but I have minimized it to just this area out of necessity, since it likely isn't."

I would like to see how much CVEs go down over time. The fact sudo is being rewritten suggests that even after long periods of use, security issues popping up is still a common-ish problem?

Compiler checking is always better than programmer checking.

As someone who uses rust, I assume you would prefer the former absolutely.

the draft is slavery and immoral

I agree with this, but I also think this is such a “peace time” opinion.

If, for example, the nazis were at risk of invading the American homeland, would you want to wait until they are here and volunteers start coming in?

Again, I agree the draft is immoral, but so is war.

EDIT: for an even better example you should look up what the Japanese did to most civilians in WWII and really ask yourself if a draft to avoid that at home is bad.

Right which is why I am saying jury nullification is bad. These situations happen because of it.

Right but isn't the whole issue we have with white people walking free after crimes while black people face the actual punishment all because of this exact issue?

White college girl has weed, jury nullifies. Black unemployed guy has weed, jail.

So you would be pro a situation like this:

White college kid is caught with intent-to-distribute amount of weed, jury allows them to walk away even though they are guilty.

Black kid is caught with intent-to-distribute amount of weed, jury decides to enforce jail time this time.

I mean what harm would it do?

a jury decides randomly in every single trial whether they want to enforce something.

Isn't that jury nullification? That's the exact thing I am saying, shouldn't happen.

Not being able to talk about jury nullification does not mean all judges are crooks.

The reason people try to discourage “jury nullification” is because if a law is unjust, it should be removed, not be in place for certain juries to give _some_ people passes.

The law should be the law. If you allow juries to decide to give “innocent” verdicts even if someone broke it, then congrats you have made a system where the jury gets to decide randomly if they want to enforce something.

I know this is hammered to death on HN, but you could definitely argue memory safety is a reason not to use systems languages for anything else.

Granted though it means what you meant by "it". I read that as "a systems programming language", but if you specifically meant Nim then I think it can enable a GC.

I agree, but what people prefer vs what companies do are very different.

Companies rarely pay for totally rewrites. Nim compiles to C and offers safety that can work on top of codebases without a re-write.

Though I have to say - are there really that many scenarios in 2022 where a GC is unacceptable?

There are more systems programming jobs (where GC is not usable) today than there was years ago. The percentage of all programming jobs that they make up is smaller, but the absolute number is bigger: https://www.toptal.com/c/after-all-these-years-the-world-is-...

Not saying the original poster is this type of person, but I actually work with a lot of recent bootcamp grads and you be surprised how many think C is totally not used anymore. To many of them, the whole world is written in python and JavaScript.

question:

How do unit tests stay green when you rewrite in another language? Are your tests an external API you call?

It’s not about crashing, it’s about exposing memory that could lead to security vulnerabilities.

And FFI? As in the Unix extensions? That’s the operating systems calls, not the language. By that logic, python is as dangerous as C++.

It’s crazy how so many people on this thread say rust is the only choice because of memory safety, and are now bending over backwards trying to claim memory safety is no big deal. So much so FFI is now being brought up smh.

Right but if you imported one of those crates, then your “safe” rust would have memory safety issues.

So bam, you just introduced memory safety issues into your web API. This is like a C++ dev using C++ and causing memory issues unnecessarily just because they don’t want to use a safe language.

And Elixir has concurrency and memory safety and it’s guaranteed, so no package you import can violate it. Unlike rust, where you can use safe rust and think there’s no violation, but then use a crate and suddenly have memory unsafety and concurrency violations.

These crates worries are wayyy better than normal C++, but they are terrible compared to any actually safe language.

Right but to my knowledge (and I could be wrong) that unsafe tag does to prevent it in the crates.

Many memory safety violations have been discovered in rust crates: https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/11/rudra-rust-safety/

Maybe I wrong on that, but if it can’t guarantee crate safety, then it doesn’t really do anything.

Are you gonna argue that no GC language exists that is more safe than rust?

There were over 200 memory safety violations discovered in rust crates: https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/11/rudra-rust-safety/

Elixir for example, is very safe and guarantees more safety than rust.

I don’t why people keep finding one GC language that has unsafe, then declaring my argument wrong.

My point is you can find a safe GC language with all the benefits of rust.

Interesting. I heard the Civilization games were Lua, didn’t know that was more common.

If that were true, all enterprise code would still be non-GC

Bloated is the problem, not language speed. I may have misspoke, what I meant was speed in language never matters.

And the discord instance was because it was systems/performance critical software they rewrote. They didn’t rewrite there web APIs. Discord mentioned the rewrite is now rust with C++ glueing it together. No way you are using C++ unless you have to.

I’ll agree with you on python venv/pip. Ugh what a mess. I like cargo, but honestly I think you could argue cargo also is an issue. When you bring in 100 crates, you just gotta hope all the unsafe code in them are safe.

A static analyzer found 200 memory unsafety issues in rust crates: https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/11/rudra-rust-safety/

Memory safe GC languages you don’t have to worry about that, and you can get a package manager.

I think you can have null safety in Go and you certainly can have adts.

But even then, what about Ada?

I’m also not an expert, but I assume between C#/Typescript/haskell/swift that you can find all those things in many GC/safer languages.

Right, but to my knowledge the other “safety” of rust is concurrency, which is easily attainable with something like Elixir.

I’m not saying a GC guarantees all safety, I am saying you can find a GC language that gives all the safety (and technically more) of rust.

My quote of “future unsafety” is that even if your code currently uses only safe rust, their will always be the chance someone adds unsafe rust, increasing the safety issues.

It just seems you can find a GC alternative that will never run into the issues rust can cause, and it will be faster to develope/change (because no borrow checker), and there is no downside.