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by ironman1478 209 days ago
I'm not a fan of rust, but I don't think that is the only takeaway. All systems have assumptions about their input and if the assumption is violated, it has to be caught somewhere. It seems like it was caught too deep in the system.

Maybe the validation code should've handled the larger size, but also the db query produced something invalid. That shouldn't have ever happened in the first place.
2 comments
asa400 209 days ago
> It seems like it was caught too deep in the system.

Agreed, that's also my takeaway.

I don't see the problem being "lazy programmers shouldn't have called .unwrap()". That's reductive. This is a complex system and complex system failures aren't monocausal.

The function in question could have returned a smarter error rather than panicking, but what then? An invariant was violated, and maybe this system, at this layer, isn't equipped to take any reasonable action in response to that invariant violation and dying _is_ the correct thing to do.

But maybe it could take smarter action. Maybe it could be restarted into a known good state. Maybe this service could be supervised by another system that would have propagated its failure back to the source of the problem, alerting operators that a file was being generated in such a way that violated consumer invariants. Basically, I'm describing a more Erlang model of failure.

Regardless, a system like this should be able to tolerate (or at least correctly propagate) a panic in response to an invariant violation.

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9rx 209 days ago
The takeaway here isn’t about Rust itself, but that the Rust marketing crew’s claims that we constantly read on HN and elsewhere about the Result type magically saving you from making mistakes is not a good message to send.
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tuetuopay 209 days ago
They would also tell you that .unwrap() has no place in production code, and should receive as much scrutiny as an `unsafe` block in code review :)

The point of option is the crash path is more verbose and explicit than the crash-free path. It takes more code to check for NULL in C or nil in Go; it takes more code in Rust to not check for Err.

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9rx 208 days ago
1. They don’t. There is presumably some hypothetical world where they would tell you if you start asking questions, but nobody buying into the sales pitch ever asks questions.

2. You’re getting confused by technology again. This isn’t about technology.

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