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Comment by proyb2 | Hacker News Reader

> You could use LLVM to compile any language to LLVM IR, and then to machine code using a backend. Does that mean every language has the same properties as Rust?

    Nope, it's largely depend on the language design.

> If Node/Java/Go use GC (or VMs), then aren't they more safe than Rust?

    Yes and No, memory allocation is one of the issue in GC. Go is generally more safe on networking but not security where Rust can manage it securely.

This is a good read on Java vs Rust: https://llogiq.github.io/2016/02/28/java-rust.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14173716 https://github.com/stouset/secrets/tree/stack-secrets

In fact, we don't have to bother much with GC because it's depend on programmers and job availability. GC was created based on the idea that manage memory is hard for large scale project. It work well for Azul Systems, and they have recently advertised for LLVM engineer to bring more performance where JVM could not.

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Parts are completely untrue. The JVM has the advantage to selectively jit-compile hot or small functions, whilst Rust has to compile all at once. Rust binaries are thus big, whilst you don't ship JVM binaries, you ship small bytecode.

Go has the advantage of memory safety (via GC), plus better concurrency safety, which is lacking in Rust. There are concurrency safe languages, but not mentioned in this thread.

> Rust binaries are thus big, whilst you don't ship JVM binaries, you ship small bytecode.

This is not borne out by practical experience. While we've not experimented much with Rust, our Java deployments are significantly larger than other native languages like Go (and I expect Rust would actually be a bit smaller than that since it requires less runtime than Go).

JVM deployed binaries are large, not especially because the bytecode is large, but because you have to ship all the bytecode for all your code and all its transitive dependencies; there's no linker and the semantics of the language make it essentially impossible to statically prove that individual functions or classes aren't needed. You can trim it down with tools like Proguard, but that's a non-trivial undertaking and prone to error, which again you won't know until runtime.

Plus the drawback that you need a relatively large VM to run a JVM binary, but you can run Rust binaries completely standalone (out of a scratch container if you want).

> Go has the advantage of memory safety (via GC), plus better concurrency safety, which is lacking in Rust.

I'm curious what you mean by "better concurrency safety". My understanding is that Rust attempts to statically prove that concurrent accesses are safe (e.g. https://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.h..., especially the section on locks). Go does nothing of the sort - it provides some nice concurrency primitives and tooling to detect data races, but the compiler does nothing to actively prevent it.

Go, in my understanding, is not memory safe even with its gc, and also doesn't have "concurrency safety" because of this. That's why https://golang.org/doc/articles/race_detector.html exists.

Rust however prevents these kinds of errors at compile time.

Which things were you thinking of that Rust was lacking here?

The go race detector is still miles better than enforcing manual mutexes and locking in concurrent Rust code.

Much better would be a proper type system to get rid of those at compile-time of course. Look at pony. And a better memory-safety system than RC.

You don't always need those; it depends on what you're doing. And furthermore, that _is_ the compile time system that enforces things. Go's race detector can only prove the presence of things, not their absense.

As for Pony,

> Pony-ORCA, yes the killer whale, is based on ideas from ownership and deferred, distributed, weighted reference counting.

That's it's GC.

What you mentioned JIT is exactly my thought when IBM explained why they like about Swift over Java in JVM.

More technical explanation: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSYKE2_7.0.0/com...

"In practice, methods are not compiled the first time they are called. For each method, the JVM maintains a call count, which is incremented every time the method is called. The JVM interprets a method until its call count exceeds a JIT compilation threshold. Therefore, often-used methods are compiled soon after the JVM has started, and less-used methods are compiled much later, or not at all. The JIT compilation threshold helps the JVM start quickly and still have improved performance. The threshold has been carefully selected to obtain an optimal balance between startup times and long term performance."

> Go has the advantage of memory safety (via GC), plus better concurrency safety, which is lacking in Rust.

    Are there any examples you could list?

One of Go GC issue is based on this stouset's discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14174500

Java bytecode looks rather large to me.

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