whytevuhuni

And also one I'd like to see in more languages! Especially a simpler one, closer to C.

kemarin duludiscuss

> If you don't use panics, you don't get the machinery.

I'm not using panics, and yet I'm getting the machinery. That is where my frustration is coming from.

whytevuhuni

kemarin duludiscuss

It is a fundamental language limitation, unless you want to claim that the core library (or rather what's left when using no_std) is not part of the language.

The problem comes from a combination of three things:

1. Rust's standard library (including core) likes to panic a lot, e.g. for code that is genuinely unreachable (and this is fine)

2. Rust/LLVM cannot always optimize unreachable code away (and this is also fine)

3. The presence of at least one panic causes Rust to also include the error string format machinery, which is HUGE (and this is completely unavoidable)

Because of #2, there is no way to prevent this for larger code. I can define my own panic handler, but I can't prevent panic!() calls from inside core from constructing the format message using core::fmt before they call my panic handler.

And so any non-trivial code sometimes just randomly becomes 3x larger, and I can no longer fit it on my MCU, despite never actually printing or caring about any panic messages.

whytevuhuni

3 hari yang laludiscuss

I tried to use Rust for a tiny microcontroller (GD32VF103, 128KB flash).

First of all, I was amazed by how much I could do with Rust (safe Rust, even), and how well it was interfacing with my handwritten RISC-V assembly. I will definitely use Rust again for the next such project.

But, every time my functions would get over a certain size, suddenly some optimizations stopped working, and Rust was trying to put the whole panic/fmt machinery into the thing, going above my linker's flash size limit. It was insanely frustrating, since there was no rhyme or reason to it. Simply adding another branch to a match made it do that. Or another if statement that was exactly the same as the 4 before it.

The 137 binary thing does not scale.

whytevuhuni

3 hari yang laludiscuss

Pretty much everything except Haskell and the like can be considered as such.

That's because closely following PL theory isn't always the right goal for a language. Ergonomics and pragmatism are far more important.

whytevuhuni

6 hari yang laludiscuss

Languages, no. But for language-agnostic package managers, Nix/Guix and Gentoo are similar.

Sadly, Gentoo is not great for managing per-project dependencies in the same way as is done by npm, pipenv, etc. Nix however works great (if you can stomach its stdlib).

whytevuhuni

13 hari yang laludiscuss

Ah, okay. In that case I feel like the only sane way to approach this is to completely abolish null-terminated strings, and reimplement everything (including stuff like printf's format and arguments) in terms of strv. Otherwise if there has to be a 2cstr function, it should be an allocating one.

whytevuhuni

13 hari yang laludiscuss

How does strv2cstr work? I assume it doesn't allocate, so not sure how it can add a null terminator.

whytevuhuni

15 hari yang laludiscuss

> The concept of "a garbage-collected language" is not well-defined. There are languages, like Java, Rust, and Python that depend on a garbage collection mechanism, and languages like C, C++ and Zig, which don't. C++ happens to offer a GC in its standard library, however.

How does Rust differ from C++ in this regard?

As far as I know, both use RAII, and offer something RC-like in their stdlib that is optional to use.

whytevuhuni

23 hari yang laludiscuss

The list of features and anti-features looks amazing, that's just want I want from a simple systems language.

However, the list of examples has... basically nothing. So it hasn't really proved that its set of features is enough to do anything with it.

The syntax is... off-putting. Regardless of how superficial it might seem, most systems programmers will want curly braces, and going against that is a really bad idea.

whytevuhuni

24 hari yang laludiscuss

I'm a really big fan of Rust, but I have to challenge this, GP was clearly talking about the complexity of the language itself, and that one is high.

Extra features and extra static checking add complexity. Extra complexity in the language can make simple programs harder, and they make complex programs easier to code and maintain, like you said.

However, nobody will ever be able to make a Rust equivalent of TinyCC, the language's rules are insanely complex, especially for things like GATs and the other tricky concepts it's trying to tackle.

whytevuhuni

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

Și

whytevuhuni

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

Moral of the story: A truly secure website would be a continuously morphing one where an LLM keeps rewriting and redeploying large parts of its code every minute, so that no attacker can keep up.

whytevuhuni

2 bulan yang laludiscuss

Very surprised to hear that, since editions are exactly the kind of mechanism Rust is using to make sure software will keep working unchanged for decades.

The Rust compiler can build a 2024 edition application which depends on a 2015 edition library, which in turn depends on a 2018 edition library.

Every crate can upgrade at their own pace, or even never at all.

whytevuhuni

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

> Then add in the fact that a change to history gets rippled down the descendent commits.

This sounds interesting. Could you go into a bit more detail?

I have 3 branches off of a single commit, update that commit, and all branches automatically rebase? Or?

whytevuhuni

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

The only thing this leads to is that you'll have hundreds of vendored dependencies, with a combined size impossible to audit yourself.

But if you somehow do manage that, then you'll soon have hundreds of outdated vendored dependencies, full of unpatched security issues.

whytevuhuni

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

Maybe this was a genius move made precisely to be ambiguous on whether it was April Fools or not... so that the author can later read the room and clarify whether it was or was not April Fools, without much repercussion either way.

whytevuhuni

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

That's not much different than other distros, because the way auto-update usually works, is it can't use root permissions or the system package manager (in any distro), so it has to install the newer version in $HOME. Once the update is installed, the system package becomes a trampoline to that.

I tried Discord, and this one seems to download some updates on first run, but the version sticks to the one from the system (0.0.127, latest is 0.0.129). So I assume it just doesn't update, or it tries to and fails.

whytevuhuni

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

Interesting, although I checked and on NixOS the binary is just 29MB. It was statically linked, with just libc left as dynamic.

I think 29MB is still huge for a terminal text editor, but nevertheless not "hundreds".

whytevuhuni

5 bulan yang laludiscuss

Will it be okay though? i32 to u64 has two ways to convert it:

    i32 -> u32 -> u64
    i32 -> i64 -> u64

This matters with negative numbers, where the first one pads with 32 bits of 0, the second one pads it with 32 bits of 1. Sometimes (as it once happened to me), you wanted the wrong one.

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