Hacker News Reader

Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

Article fails to mention that autocxx and crubit are aiming for much improved interop between Rust and C++. Sure they're experimental, but not more so than Val.

Rust devs are also pushing for making more of its core and std library "unsafe" friendly, to reduce the risk of unsound calls to Safe Rust from an unsafe environment with possible aliasing, pinned-in-place objects, self-references, uninitialized ("write-only") memory etc. etc. So that in itself will also deliver improved semantics between Rust and C++.

View on HN

It's pretty strange. Rust is dismissed because interop with C++ is hard, but then Val is cheered on despite its C++ interop basically being a big "todo" item.

Author admits his own bias and preference at the end.

> I do need to confess: in my spare time, I have started working with the Val team

Indeed, I think this should have been made clear in the first section. I thought when the author said they have a bias it was more in the general sense, not that they are working on one of the languages in question.

Yes, misleading.

Also just saying a language's C++ interop is better simply because it's easier doesn't really pass the smell test for me. If I need to write some interop for a C++ library, I'm going to prefer one that's more reliable than one that's easy but can fail in weird ways. And unless my project is an interoperability library, I'm not sold on "harder = worse" when I'm most likely going to write the interop once, ever, and be done with it. If it takes me a day, but then I can rely on it to function well and fail in predictable ways, I'm still on board. There's nothing wrong with something being difficult if the result removes a ton of mental load.

I'm not a fan of this article's conclusions at all.

Not to mention efficiency. Sure, it's 'easier' to make a copy of all the data when crossing the FFI boundary

Can you explain what you mean, about unsafe friendliness in the standard library?

I believe this is referring to the interop abi that is in planning.

It aims to expose a nicer way to glue rust idioms to similar or equivalent idioms in other languages.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/105586

Not the poster of the comment but I'd like to hear from the downvoter why this was downvoted.

As a Rust novice, interpreting the comment GP made (from the perspective of, for example, C++ calling Safe Rust core or stdlib) this seems like a valid response.

Would the downvoter like to comment as to why I too got downvoted?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com