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White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe (www.whitehouse.gov)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).

On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I do really like the error system in rust for its descriptions. I guess the difficulty for me, which maybe will go away after writing more rust, is that my intuition for what is efficient and what isn’t totally breaks down.

I find myself passing copies of values around and things like that, it might be that the compiler just takes care of that, or that I just don’t know how to do it well but that’s often the point of friction for me.

Totally agree on the refactor though, most of the time it doesn’t even take that much time since you know the skeleton of what you want at that point!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I find myself passing copies of values around and things like that, it might be that the compiler just takes care of that,

Rust prefers explicitness over magic. So it does what you tell it and doesn't just take care of that.

If you're copying a lot of values around (I.e cloning. Not moving or borrowing), then you're definitely doing it inefficiently. But you don't have to worry too much about that. If there are too many difficulties in borrowing, it may be because those borrows are problematic with respect to memory safety. In such cases, sacrificing performance through cloning may be an acceptable compromise to preserve memory safety. In the end, you end up with the right balance of performance (through borrowing) and safety (through cloning). That balance is hard to achieve in C/C++ (lacking in safety) or in GC languages (lacking in performance).

If that's the friction you're facing in Rust, then I would say that you're already in a good position and you're just trying too hard.