BatmanAoD @ BatmanAoD @programming.dev

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Have you considered that one property of actual, real-life human intelligence is being "too complicated to have precise guidelines"?

And in fact it's not specific to Rust, and Rust is the first language with a fix available. (Thanks to some other comments for pointing this out.) Java has apparently declared it "won't fix."

https://flatt.tech/research/posts/batbadbut-you-cant-securely-execute-commands-on-windows/#appendix-b-status-of-the-affected-programming-languages

Kotlin isn't just for Android; IMO unless you're trying to do purely functional programming, it's preferable to Scala for JVM work.

That's fair, but if you edit the question to explain how it's different (without which, how could anyone even answer your question?), it can be (and often is) reopened.

They also changed the wording from "closed" to "on hold" years ago, and I don't think I've ever seen the people complaining about the site take any notice.

To be fair, I'm a pretty thorough code reviewer and I've definitely made a mistake of this kind.

Probably more importantly, it runs on the JVM and is designed to interoperate with existing Java code. (FWIW, I actually think they made a major mistake in how they handle null Java objects, and that Kotlin did better here; but Kotlin is much newer.)

That's true in C as well, though. This is what people mean when they say things like "undefined behavior can result in time travel".

The difference is twofold:

• Rust's rules for valid unsafe code are not completely formalized yet. This means that there are open questions about whether particularly complex patterns in unsafe code will be guaranteed by future versions of the compiler to be sound. Conversely, the C and C++ spec are generally sufficient to determine whether any particular piece of code has undefined behavior, even if actually analyzing it to find out is not possible automatically using existing static analysis tools.
• Because safe Rust is so strict about what it permits, the compiler is able to make more aggressive optimizations; in theory, this could indeed cause undefined behavior to be "worse" at runtime than a comparable situation in a globally-unsafe language. I'm unaware of any actual examples of that phenomenon, though.

Why not just stick with Python until there's a need to learn something else?

Whoever named the "final final fixed" one seems to have missed the point of version control. 😑

...yeah, I already said that if there is another branch starting with those letters it should be deleted. You need a naming convention.

git checkout ma<tab>

If you don't have autocomplete set up for your shell, get it working. If someone has a different branch named ma..., ask if you can delete it, and get your team to adopt a decent branch naming convention.

Sorry, my phrasing was sloppy. Most popular IDEs and editors do not have a plug-in or setting that implements elastic tabstops correctly. In particular, there's no implementation for vim, emacs, VSCode, eclipse, or any JetBrains IDEs. (I had forgotten that there's one for Visual Studio and one for Notepad++.)

Essentially no. I wish so badly that this had taken off.

Edit: as noted on the website, various plug-ins that attempt support are in fact not correct.

To play devil's advocate, most systems programming can be done even with a garbage collector. Midori was a project to build an operating system on a variant of C#, and although the garbage collector did impose technical difficulties, it wasn't a dealbreaker. Go isn't usable everywhere Rust is, but it can in fact be used for many things that previously would have been considered "systems" niches (which is part of why there was a somewhat prevalent misconception in the early days of Rust that they were similar languages). Prominent D developers have defended D's garbage collector (even though it's technically optional). Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, used to express great confidence that C++ would one day have a garbage collector.

...but you're right, Rust and its rise in popularity (and, conversely, the C++ community's resistance to adopt anything with garbage collection) have definitely narrowed the common definition of "systems programming" to exclude anything with a "thick" runtime.

No, if you try to index something out-of-bounds it will panic, which is not a memory-safety gap.

And even if releases are hosted on github, there should ideally be a download links page somewhere that presents the different binaries or installation files in an easier to understand format, especially if the software is designed for non-developers.

That's not a download button for the program. But there is indeed a link to the release page right on the home page of the project, so you're still correct.

Yeah, I commented elsewhere on the misinformation regarding emacs in the article.

Sure. But the author cites that as a disadvantage of emacs and links to an article about the person who invented ctrl-c and ctrl-v for copy and paste.