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by do_not_redeem
539 days ago
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Rust's approach is more like a "keep off the grass sign" than a barbed wire fence. If Rust really wasn't meant to be used for these things, it wouldn't have the unsafe keyword at all. But instead of forbidding those things entirely, it just makes them uncomfortable. This nudges the programmer to question if they really need to be on the grass to accomplish their goal, and helps subconsciously steer them onto the safer path. This is the "strategic use of friction" described here, ironically enough, by the creator of Zig: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/3320#issuecomment-8844... |
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The details in the linked articles rise well above merely "uncomfortable" though. If your response was appropriate, we wouldn't be here discussing them. In particular the interaction between the borrow and aliasing analysis is something I hadn't thought of before, and seems terrifying.
This gets back to my earlier point. The Rust community seems to have abandoned introspection for orthodoxy. You say something interesting about it, and the response comes back as a canon incantation about why Rust is always right. But there are interesting criticisms to be made, people just don't want to hear them it seems.
(In particular the bit about "you can't write dlist in safe rust" routinely seems to surprise people, even reasonably expert Rust developers, I talk to in real life. The flock's dedication to the borrow checker apparently means that no one is allowed to discuss or think about the places where it can't work!)