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by gnuvince 4444 days ago
I guess, then, that you weren't part of the Battlefield 4 team [1]. I've discussed the issue of the "no decent programmer" fallacy in the past; yes, in theory if programmers were careful and alert, they could create flawless software, yet this never happens in practice because humans are prone to errors (i.e. not understanding a subtlety of the language or library, thinking that a validation is done at a different level of abstraction, failing to imagine what could be an error scenario and how it could occur, etc.). Languages like Rust offer the same capabilities as C or C++, while eliminating entire classes of bug sources.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_4#Technical_issues_...
1 comments
maccard 4444 days ago
If BF4 was written in Csharp, or java (or rust or go?? I'm sure it would still have just as many bugs. One of peoples biggest complaint is the kill shots that you don't see, but that's a design choice (client side hit detection).
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steveklabnik 4444 days ago
Of course, it's impossible to speculate without seeing the codebase, but considering that Rust makes several classes of C++ bugs impossible at compile time, I'd be hard-pressed to imagine that a Rust version wouldn't be less buggy.
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loup-vaillant 4444 days ago
If the safer type system gives the devs an unwarranted sense of security, they might write less tests, be less careful in their design, or wait longer between audits and other sanity checks.

If on the other hand the devs understand which classes of bugs aren't ruled out in Rust, then sure, you will end up with fewer bugs.

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bjz_ 4443 days ago
Rust's type system eliminates the need to test for whole classes of bugs, because they are statically checked for at compile time. This means that tests can be more focused on logic errors rather than standard book keeping. If you look at the example set by the rust repository itself (https://github.com/mozilla/rust/), it is heavily tested and every single PR (https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pulls) is reviewed before merging. This discipline definitely filters down into third party libraries.
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maccard 4442 days ago
Less prone to certain kinds of bugs, sure. But logical errors, not necessarily.
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