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by tome
3597 days ago
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> I came out thinking that doing seemingly simple stuff in Rust, such a mutable linked list, is too complicated ... writing a safe linked list in C++ ... is _trivial_ This is really interesting to me as a curious outside observer of Rust. I conclude that either writing a safe mutable linked list in C++ is really not easy or Rust's type system makes it too complicated to capture simple invariants and properties. Which is it? |
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The trivial "safe" C++ linked list prevents you from dereferencing uninitialized memory, leaking resources and performing incorrect type conversions, which are the typical issues you'll find in any C linked-list implementation. But there's no compile-time check for the actual lifetime of the objects. This means you can manually destruct the same object twice, for example, and the compiler will not warn.
RAII can get you /very/ close, but since it's not enforced at the compiler level, Rust guarantee is definitely stronger.
My main point is that the strong guarantee comes also at a significant complexity cost, and I'm still not sold it's worth it in many conditions.