Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yawaramin 3455 days ago
Almost everything you mentioned as 'clever' is trying to achieve either type-safety or memory-safety. To your coworkers I would reply: would you like the compiler to handle error-prone memory deallocations? Or do you want to keep doing it manually and wait till runtime to find potential mistakes?
1 comments
zerofan 3455 days ago
I don't believe those clever things are necessary for safety or performance. I think many of them are incidental and caused by a lack of taste or just a disregard for the value of simplicity. Rust deserves credit for it's good ideas, but these aren't those, and I believe there will be other high performance (non-GC) languages that are more accessible to non Computer Scientists [1].

> To your coworkers I would reply: would you like the compiler to handle error-prone memory deallocations? Or do you want to keep doing it manually and wait till runtime to find potential mistakes?

They don't really care about memory deallocations - the program will finish soon anyways, and the operating system will cleanup the mess. Sorry, they've already excused you from the office and have gotten back to getting their work done.

Btw, modern C++ programmers don't worry about memory deallocations either. You should find a better bogeyman.

[1] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan... (yes, most people disregard benchmarks, but you need someway to discuss performance)

link
yawaramin 3455 days ago
> I don't believe those clever things are necessary for safety or performance. I think many of them are incidental and caused by a lack of taste or just a disregard for the value of simplicity.

Well, I just re-read your list of 'clever' features, and can't really see how any of them is incidental, or in fact how some of them are worse than the exact same features in Swift, which you mentioned.

> ... I believe there will be other high performance (non-GC) languages that are more accessible to non Computer Scientists....

Not sure what to make of this comparison, given that Rust beat Swift in the majority of the benchmark tasks. Also, you have to look at the quality of the compilers themselves. Rust is universally acknowledged to be a high-quality compiler, while Swift (especially together with Xcode) are often bemoaned as buggy and crashy.

> They don't really care about memory deallocations ... the operating system will cleanup the mess.

Well, I have to say they are an extremely lucky bunch. Most systems programmers don't have the luxuxy of writing script-sized programs which use the OS as their garbage collector.

> Btw, modern C++ programmers don't worry about memory deallocations either. You should find a better bogeyman.

I was specifically replying to your Fortran example, but for the sake of argument, to C++ programmers I'd ask, 'Would you like to do high-performance concurrency with statically guaranteed no data races?'

link