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by lunar_mycroft 18 days ago
You can also do one by using `unsafe` liberally, especially if you're flexible about actually upholding rust's rules (as the bun team just did). But either way, you're still stuck with a code base that's going to need extensive refactoring if you want to actually take advantage of rust.
2 comments
Tadpole9181 18 days ago
Which is still a step ahead of Zig, which requires an entire rewrite to have the tiniest shred of RAII or borrow checking. What's your point, that if we can't do everything perfectly in one step we can't do it at all?
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lunar_mycroft 18 days ago
> Which is still a step ahead of Zig

First off, you seem to be under the impression I'm a rust hater. Noting could be further from the truth. Rust is easily my favorite language at this point, I reach for it for basically everything (except quick scripts). While I do like a lot of zig's philosophy, I think at the end of the day the empirical evidence is overwhelming that manual memory management isn't sufficient.

> What's your point, that if we can't do everything perfectly in one step we can't do it at all?

My point is exactly what I initially said: you typically aren't much closer to a (mostly) safe rust codebase if you've done a line by line port to (partially unsafe) rust than you were to start with. Getting to safe rust is very likely to require substantial refactors either way. This doesn't mean you shouldn't do it (on it's own), but it does mean that the bun team's strategy/assumptions are more questionable than they appear to realize.

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selfmodruntime 18 days ago
> You can also do one by using `unsafe` liberally, especially if you're flexible about actually upholding rust's rules (as the bun team just did

As in, they did not, which I can prove by using Miri and seeing hundreds of errors.

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lunar_mycroft 17 days ago
I didn't say they made a good, safe port. I literally said the opposite ("especially if you're flexible about actually upholding rust's rules"). You can get a line by line port to compile by just wrapping the parts that violate rust's ownership rules in `unsafe`. You won't have fixed the problem, and it won't be memory safe, but you can do it.
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