Ephera

Yeah, they renamed it a couple months ago. The core team got tired of copying MineCraft 1-to-1, as there’s just no creativity involved in that and you’re hardly allowed to improve on the original.

But that’s what I mentioned regarding Java there. Java calls them “exceptions”, but generally forces the caller to either handle them or explicitly bubble them upwards…

The guy keeps on picking on Go, which is infamous for having terrible error handling, and then he has the nerve to even pick on the UNIX process return convention, which was designed in the 70s.
The few times he mentions Rust, for whatever reason he keeps on assuming that .unwrap() is the only choice, which’s use is decidedly discouraged in production code.

I do think there is room for debate here. But error handling is a hellishly complex topic, with different needs between among others:

• short- vs. long-running processes
• API vs. user-facing
• small vs. big codebase
• library vs. application code
• prototyping vs. production phase

And even if you pick out a specific field, the two concepts are not clearly separated.
Error values in Rust usually have backtraces these days, for example (unless you’re doing embedded where this isn’t possible).
Or Java makes you list exceptions in your function signature (except for unchecked exceptions), so you actually can’t just start throwing new exceptions in your little corner without the rest of the codebase knowing.
I find it quite difficult to properly define the differences between the two.

Statcounter relies on web tracking to try to estimate the usage shares. Theoretically, there could be millions of science PCs running Linux, but one guy is browsing the internet with a Windows PC. Basically, take this data with a massive grain of salt…

I’m pretty sure that’s not how dyslexia works, but either way, I didn’t write that. And while the title of the article suggests otherwise, the news here isn’t that Google says something is easy. The news is that they published a guide to make that thing easy.

Wut? They’re a member, because they find Rust useful. This is just them saying another time that they find Rust useful.
While they (and everyone using Rust) will benefit off of more people using Rust, it’s not like they have a vested interest to the point of spreading misinformation.

If you’ve so far been able to do this stuff in Java, then presumably all your hardware has an OS and such and you don’t need this, but a colleague has been having a lot of fun with Rust and proper embedded development.

It’s very different from regular development, as you’ve got no OS, no filesystem, no memory allocations, no logging. It can most definitely be a pain.
But the guy always has the biggest grin on his face when he tells that he made a custom implementation of the CAN protocol (TCP is too complex for embedded 🙃) and that he had to integrate an LED to output error information and stuff like that. At the very least, it seems to be a lot less abstract, as you’re working directly with the hardware.

Hmm, I’ve never looked too much at benchmarks for this, but is there reason to believe Python would use less memory for a similarly complex project? It still needs a runtime, and it has to do a larger interpretation step at runtime (i.e. it needs to start from human-readable code rather than from bytecode)…

Yeah, we do this regularly at $DAYJOB, although we use Cross.

Basically, if you pull in any libraries with vendored C code, like e.g. OpenSSL, then you’d need to configure a linker and set up cross-compilation for C code.
Cross does the whole compilation in a container where this is already set up, so you just need to install Docker or Podman on your host system.

Basically:

cargo install cross

cross build --release --target=armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf

…and out plops your binary for a Raspberry Pi.

At first I thought, they’re releasing this news now to drown out the Concord news, but 30 year anniversary, maybe they did have this planned a little longer. 🙃

Well, apparently that’s only 5.8% of trips:

About 47% of the trips replaced a public transit, carpool, walking or cycling trip. An additional 5.8% of trips represented “induced travel,” meaning the person would not have made the trip were an Uber or Lyft unavailable.

I guess, maybe the remaining 47.2% are taxi rides which got replaced by Uber/Lyft?

I tried something like that once. Basically, I was trying to create an API with which sysadmins could script deployments. That involves lots of strings, so I was hoping I could avoid the String vs. &str split by making everything &'static str.

And yeah, the problem is that this only really works within one function. If you need to pass a parameter into a function, that function either accepts a &'static reference which makes it impossible to call this function with an owned type or non-static reference, or you make it accept any reference, but then everything below that function has normal borrowing semantics again.

I guess, with the former you could Box::leak() to pass an owned type or non-static reference, with the downside of all your APIs being weird.
Or maybe your prototyping just happens at the top and you’re fine with making individual functions accept non-static references. I guess, you’ll still have to try it.

Since you’re already at the bargaining stage of grief programming, maybe you’re aware, but Rc and Arc are the closest you can get to a GC-like feel. These do reference counting, so unlike GC, they can’t easily deal with cyclic references, but aside from that, same thing.
Unfortunately, they do still have the same problem with passing them as parameters…

Yeah, I don’t think that can happen without splitting the whole ecosystem in half. Garbage collection requires a runtime, and tons of the code semantics are also just different between the two, particularly with asynchronous code.

I also imagine that many people wouldn’t just leave their particular program in the GC version, but never even bother to learn the ownership/borrowing semantics, even though those largely stop being painful after a few months.

But yeah, I actually don’t think it’s too bad to have individual parts of the ecosystem using their own memory management strategies.
The two examples that I can think of are ECS for gamedev and signals/reactivity for UI frameworks. Which is what is used in C++ or JavaScript, Kotlin, too. You’d probably still want to use these strategies, even if you’ve got garbage collection available…

How many bugs you encounter is unfortunately not a good metric, because devs will compensate by just thinking harder. The goal is rather to not need to think as hard, which increases productivity and helps out your team members (including your future self).

It took me a few months of working in an immutable-by-default language before I had the epiphany that everything is exactly like it’s written down in code (so long as it’s not marked as mutable). I don’t need to look at each variable and think about whether it might get changed somewhere down the line. A whole section of my brain just switched off that day.

As the other person said, there’s also nothing stopping you from using mutability, it’s just not the default, because most variables simply don’t get mutated, even in C code.
But I would even go so far that Rust is actually making mutability fashionable again. It has introduced various new concepts in this regard, which you won’t know from other languages.

For example, you can opt a variable into mutability, make your changes and then opt out of it again.
And if a function wants to modify one of its parameters, you have to explicitly pass a mutable reference, which is visible both in the function signature and where you’re calling the function.

But perhaps most importantly, it blocks you from mutating variables that you’ve passed into a different thread (unless you wrap the value in a mutex or similar).
In most of the immutable languages up until this point, the immutability was achieved by always copying memory when you want to change it, which is insanely inefficient. Rust doesn’t need this, by instead requiring that you follow its ownership/borrowing rules.

Edit:
I also don’t know what you heard, but this is for example written in Rust: https://bevyengine.org/examples/3d-rendering/bloom-3d/
The code is right below. It uses lots of mutability…

It’s the “Entity-Component-System architecture”, consisting out of:

• entities, which are basically just IDs to associate different components,
• components, which are individual data points like the health or the position or the velocity of an entity, and
• systems, which operate on components to introduce interactivity. For example, you might have a system which looks at all entities with a position and a velocity component, and then it just adds the velocity to the position. Then another system checks for collisions based on the position component and the dimensions component, and then subtracts from the health component when a collision happened.

It’s kind of a competing strategy to OOP. It offers better performance and better flexibility, at the cost of being somewhat more abstract and maybe not quite as intuitive. But yeah, those former two advantages make it very popular for simulations / gamedev. Any major game engine has an ECS architecture under the hood, or at least something similar to it.

Right. 😅

Apparently, we’re on different pages in this regard, but to me these are less functional language features and more just modern language features.

In my not-so-humble opinion, it was never a good idea to make everything mutable by default. It adds so much mental overhead to try to keep track of where your state could be getting modified, especially in multi-threaded scenarios.
We just didn’t have the type system expertise and compiler technology to enforce it without runtime overhead. Now that we have that, I don’t think any full-fledged programming language should be released with everything mutable by default.

The cool kids in systems programming are using Rust now. I have no idea if game devs are using it.

It’s not fully there yet for production use, but there is certainly interest:

• There’s Rust bindings for scripting Godot.
• A game engine is being built in pure Rust, called Bevy. It’s still lacking e.g. a GUI editor, but people are already building smaller games with it.
• And there’s a somewhat more established gamedev studio, Embark Studios, which is contributing quite a bit to the Rust gamedev ecosystem. Might know them from the title ‘The Finals’, which however wasn’t yet implemented in Rust.

One thing to note about Rust for gamedev is that it enforces correctness to a degree which makes it cumbersome for prototyping.
Using it with an ECS already alleviates a lot of that pain (by sidestepping Rust’s memory management). And I do imagine, much like in C++, that more and more abstractions will be built on top of it to eventually make it very nice to use.
But yeah, Rust isn’t as clear-cut of an upgrade yet, as it is in some other fields.

Yeah, it’s got some features typically found in functional languages, like first-class functions (being able to pass around functions like values) and various list functions, e.g. .map(), .filter() etc., but the basic control flow is very much imperative.

What’s the other half? People using a ride-sharing service, even though they could take their own car, just for a laugh? People foregoing use of their private jet?

I believe, they’ve got sensors detecting whether a person is nearby and then they turn on the cameras.

But yeah, definitely sounds like a feature that would be wildly illegal in my country.