Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ArkyBeagle 3662 days ago
But presumably some sort of bug would have. Broken is broken. If Rust correctly deduces the intent leading to the bad dereference, then it's REALLY GOOD! :)

( no snark; I hope you get my point )

Ironically, reliability is actually a value of merit with 'C'/C++ - in cases. It's just that the ways of doing that seem rather inaccessible these days, or the flow of people past seeing them is not working out.

I don't think there will ever be a way around developing proper test vectors. It's quite interesting work but it tends to go unrewarded.

1 comments

As a C++ developer for 13 years I got to say that language just makes screwing up so much easier. The last year I've been coding Swift and man it is so much easier to avoid so many pitfalls in C++. I could write page upon page about all the problems with C++ and how those problems don't exist in modern languages like Swift and Rust.

Programming languages isn't just fashion, we invent them because we thing we can solve old problems in better ways.

Most of my co-workes doing C++ never even wanted to look at the alternatives. Being the only thing they have ever done, they don't even realize how bad it is. They have just internalized it.

You'll get no argument from me. That RAII exists at all is the best evidence ever ( even though I've used a variation on RAII in assembly in the past ).

The interesting question is - are there actually fewer defects, objectively, or are they simply rendered .. something like latent?

One I fixed in... April - if the file system on an SD card was scrogged, writing to the file system crashes the box. So I moved the write of a configuration file from the event of a switch change ( because if the switch was never put in that position, then there was no reason to ever do that ) to the top of the program so it'd crash when you powered up.

It helps me personally to think that defects are just something I've chosen to do despite my best effort. Keeps me on my toes. I certainly understand people being fatigued by that.